George Brocklehurst
Staff Software Engineer at GitHub
Bath, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGeorge Brocklehurst is a Staff Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building web and macOS products, currently at GitHub after a decade of leadership at thoughtbot. He led thoughtbot’s New York development team and directed delivery and infrastructure work across client projects, combining hands-on engineering with team and process leadership. George has a strong Ruby and Rails pedigree, with notable open-source contributions to projects like Thor, Paperclip, and Shopify’s tapioca where he improved Protobuf RBI generation. His background also spans Django/Python work from earlier startup roles and independently released macOS apps—Choosy notably helped define a new category of browser-switchers. Based in Bath, UK, he pairs a first-class Computer Science degree from Manchester with a knack for refactoring and developer tooling that improves long-term maintainability. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic infrastructure fixes, cleaner APIs, and thoughtful developer experience improvements.
17 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
29,203reputation
2.4mreached
137answers
8questions
console
top-5%
dvcs
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
grep
top-5%
git
top-1%
oop
top-5%
Github Skills (62)
json10
git10
ruby-rails10
sorbet10
postgresql10
rubygems10
patch10
rspec10
command-line-interface10
rails10
cicd10
ruby10
command-line10
heroku10
activerecord10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
thoughtbot/gitsh
Nov 2013 - Dec 2019
An interactive shell for git
Role in this project:
Back-end & System Engineer
Back-end & System EngineerContributions:9 releases, 415 commits, 160 PRs in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:George made significant contributions to the project, primarily focused on improving the Gitsh command-line interface. The user worked on refactoring the codebase to include the functionality to pipe the output of shell commands, handling of tab completion and improved the error reporting and handling capabilities of the shell. These modifications demonstrate a focus on enhancing the core functionality and usability of the command-line tool. The user also worked on implementing support for shell commands.
clibashterminalshellzsh
thoughtbot/suspenders
May 2014 - Oct 2021
A Rails template with our standard defaults.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 2 pushes in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:George made several contributions to the Rails template project, focusing on infrastructure and configuration improvements. They updated the project to use PostgreSQL 9.3 on Travis CI, addressing potential compatibility issues. The user also fixed whitespace and indentation issues in configuration files and updated dependencies by switching from chromedriver-helpers to webdrivers. Additionally, they corrected the ActionMailer asset host settings and the regex used to remove comments from Rails config files.
ruby-on-railsherokutemplaterailsruby
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