Douglas Shearer
Chief Technology Officer at Shearer Consultancy Limited
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDouglas Shearer is a pragmatic technology leader and hands-on CTO with 18 years of experience building developer-friendly, production-grade web platforms for healthcare education, media, and startups. Based in Edinburgh, he has a track record of modernising engineering practices—growing teams from single engineers to double-digit squads, introducing CI/CD, IaC, and developer staging environments to boost velocity and reliability. He blends deep full-stack engineering skills (notably Ruby, AWS, Docker/ECS and Terraform) with operational excellence, having driven major cost and compliance wins including dramatic encoding-cost reductions and SOC2/HIPAA readiness. An active contributor to the Ruby ecosystem, he improved data integrity and test coverage in the acts_as_follower gem, reflecting his focus on robust, well-tested systems. Passionate about mentorship and developer experience, he prioritises tooling and processes that empower teams to ship with confidence while aligning technical decisions to business outcomes.
18 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science at The University of Edinburgh
English
Stackoverflow
26,230reputation
3.0mreached
233answers
0questions
ruby
top-1%
heroku
top-5%
git
top-1%
git-merge
top-5%
activerecord
top-5%
regex
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
git10
testing10
ruby10
version-control10
activerecord10
ruby-on-rails10
test-automation10
polymorphism9
regex9
youtube9
validation9
rails9
rspec9
sudo9
heroku9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
tcocca/acts_as_follower
Oct 2008 - Dec 2008
A Gem to add Follow functionality for models
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:17 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Douglas contributed significantly to the `acts_as_follower` gem, focusing on core functionality and testing. They implemented unique follow constraints and added a comprehensive test suite structure. Further contributions involved adding new methods for following, and testing the new methods. They also addressed a bug related to polymorphic relationships and dependent record destruction, ensuring data integrity.
followgemruby
dougal/pincountpodcast.com
Jul 2016 - Nov 2024
Contributions:155 pushes, 15 branches in 8 years 5 months
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