Gary Donovan
Senior Software Engineer at ExoFlare
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGary Donovan is a senior software and cloud engineer based in Sydney with 13 years of experience building robust backend systems primarily in Python and AWS. He blends hands-on server-side development, serverless infrastructure and AWS CDK design with technical leadership roles that span platform engineering to head of engineering. Gary has led teams delivering complex, production-grade services—from GraphQL APIs to regulated banking platforms—and routinely owned infrastructure, CI/CD and operational incident work. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved widely-used projects such as moto (AWS mocking) and django-lifecycle, fixing subtle bugs in DynamoDB mocks and model lifecycle hooks. He’s comfortable moving between Java and Python codebases and is particularly focused on making backend logic and infrastructure both efficient and maintainable. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic engineer who combines deep systems thinking with a bias for shipping reliable, well-tested solutions.
13 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BE, Geomatic Engineering, BE, Geomatic Engineering at University of New South WalesUNSW Sydney
English
Github Skills (19)
selenium-grid10
javascript10
boto10
webdriver10
python10
django10
testing10
web-automation10
amazon-dynamodb10
dynamodb10
aws10
nodejs10
phantomjs10
database-migrations9
error-handling9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
getmoto/moto
Jun 2018 - Apr 2022
A library that allows you to easily mock out tests based on AWS infrastructure.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 11 PRs, 13 comments in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Gary primarily contributed to the `moto` library, which mocks AWS infrastructure. Their work involved fixing bugs and improving the accuracy of the DynamoDB service mocking, addressing issues with comparison operators and set data types. Additionally, the user made minor improvements like fixing typos and mitigating botocore version incompatibilities. They also implemented group management features for cognito-idp.
ec2bototestinginfrastructureaws-infrastructure
rsinger86/django-lifecycle
Jun 2018 - Aug 2018
Declarative model lifecycle hooks, an alternative to Signals.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 4 PRs, 1 comment in 2 months
Contributions summary:Gary primarily contributed to the backend logic of the `django-lifecycle` project, focusing on its core functionality and integration with Django models. Their work involved refactoring code, fixing bugs related to many-to-many relationships, and improving the efficiency of the lifecycle hook methods. They also added features for handling multiple conditions in hooks and updated tests.
lifecycledjangodeclarativedjango-modelstransition-conditions
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