Giles Knap
Beamline Software Engineer - Technical Controls at Diamond Light Source Ltd.
South Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGiles Knap is an experienced software engineer with over 30 years in IT and 14 years focused on scientific research software, currently developing beamline controls at Diamond Light Source. He blends enterprise-grade engineering from roles at Microsoft and HP with hands-on research support, applying his MSc in Computational Science to enable reproducible experiments and automation on synchrotron beamlines. His open-source work includes maintaining gphotos-sync backend components, demonstrating practical expertise in OAuth2, media indexing and resilient file handling. Comfortable leading small technical teams and building bespoke systems, he has a track record of delivering robust control and data-management solutions for both industry and academia. Based in South Oxfordshire, he pairs deep legacy-system knowledge with modern back-end practices to bridge operational needs and research innovation.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc 2:1, Computer Science with Microelectronics, BSc 2:1, Computer Science with Microelectronics at Queen Mary’s College, London UniversityMSc (PG Cert), Computational Science by Research, MSc (PG Cert), Computational Science by Research at University of Reading
Stackoverflow
535reputation
62kreached
14answers
3questions
Github Skills (11)
python10
oauth10
apidoc9
api9
file-management8
database-management8
unit-testing6
google-photos-api6
google-api6
google-photos6
python-requests6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
gilesknap/gphotos-sync
Jul 2017 - Nov 2022
Google Photos and Albums backup with Google Photos Library API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:46 releases, 7 reviews, 678 commits in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Giles focused on developing and maintaining the back-end logic of the Google Photos sync tool, with modifications related to authentication, album management, and file handling. They implemented functionality for connecting to Google Photos using OAuth2, managing album contents, and improving the retrieval of media files. They also focused on addressing issues with existing file management and indexing.
pythongooglebackupgoogle-photospython3
gilesknap/IaC-at-home
Feb 2022 - Dec 2022
Documentation and configuration for my attempt to bootstrap configure my home cluster from a github repo
Contributions:44 commits, 1 PR, 33 pushes in 10 months
home-clusterdockerconfigureterraformcluster
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.