Elliot Smith is a Senior Developer based in England with 16 years of experience building web applications and backend systems across JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Java. He blends hands-on engineering with open source stewardship—contributing backend and automation improvements to high-profile projects in the OpenEmbedded/Yocto ecosystem used in space and embedded projects. His career spans public sector and finance (Ministry of Justice, Unity Trust Bank) through media and research organisations (BBC, Intel), delivering data migrations, semantic web platforms, build automation and secure integrations like two‑factor and token.io. Comfortable across LAMP stacks, RESTful services, RDF/Linked Data and NLP-adjacent work, he’s equally at home refactoring database interactions or automating build artifact collection. He also brings technical writing, GDPR and HR experience from socially minded organisations, reflecting a pragmatic, multidisciplinary approach. Known for digging into backend edge cases, Elliot often surfaces subtle data and compatibility issues that improve long-term system resilience.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Pg.Dip., Business and Information Technology, Pg.Dip., Business and Information Technology at Canterbury Christ Church University
MSc, Artificial Intelligence, MSc, Artificial Intelligence at University of Birmingham
B.A. (Hons), English and Comparative Literature, 2i, B.A. (Hons), English and Comparative Literature, 2i at University of Kent
The official bitbake Git is at https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:160 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Elliot primarily contributed to the Toaster project, addressing backend issues related to build processes. Their work involved refactoring database interactions to improve compatibility with MySQL and enhance project identification, particularly in how default projects are handled. They also implemented features for managing build artifacts and improved code for the build and project pages. The changes are centered around the project's backend functionality and database integration.
The official Git repository is at https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Automation Engineer
Contributions:10 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Elliot primarily contributed to the `toaster.bbclass` file, focusing on improving the build process within the OpenEmbedded/Yocto environment. Their commits addressed critical issues such as data type errors when parsing build statistics and separated artifact dumping from image file dumps. Furthermore, the user implemented improvements in the collection of build statistics and refactored logic for artifact detection. Their work included automating build process functions and event handling.
git-repositoryopenembedded
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Elliot Smith - Senior Developer at Ministry of Justice UK