Dougal Matthews
Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDougal Matthews is a senior software engineer based in Glasgow with 16 years building scalable, distributed systems across cloud, telecoms and payments domains. He combines deep backend engineering (Go, Python, Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL) with hands-on platform work for Grafana Cloud k6, OpenStack TripleO, and Metal-as-a-Service. A pragmatic full-stack contributor, Dougal has improved developer and user experience in prominent open-source projects—most notably migrating and polishing documentation for Django REST Framework and contributing core fixes to MkDocs and Read the Docs. He thrives in complex monorepos and service-oriented architectures, turning intricate workflows into reliable APIs and tooling. Outside of work he’s active in the Python community and balances engineering with public speaking and family life, a perspective that shapes his collaborative, user-focused approach.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering, Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (23)
markdown10
python10
tox10
django10
testing10
css10
templater10
template-engine10
mkdocs10
markdown-it10
rest10
build-automation10
html10
static-site-generation10
template-tags10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
mkdocs/mkdocs
Apr 2014 - Mar 2017
Project documentation with Markdown.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 712 commits, 447 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Dougal primarily focused on enhancing the core functionalities and stability of the MkDocs project. Their contributions included adding the homepage to the site navigation, fixing typos in configuration names, correcting image paths, and addressing Python 2.6 compatibility. Furthermore, the user implemented improvements to the testing and deployment pipelines, with contributions such as using Tox to run tests and adding the ability to deploy to a specific branch.
mkdocspythonmarkdownstatic-site-generatorproject-documentation
encode/django-rest-framework
Oct 2014 - May 2015
Web APIs for Django. 🎸
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:44 commits, 1 PR, 10 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Dougal primarily focused on improving the documentation and user interface of the Django REST framework. They migrated the documentation to MkDocs, added navigation elements like "Next" and "Previous" links, and implemented visual enhancements such as highlighting and theming. Additionally, they updated the search functionality and made adjustments to the home page presentation within the documentation. These contributions suggest a focus on improving the user experience and maintainability of the project's documentation.
apipythondjango-rest-frameworkdjangoweb-apis
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