Hamish Downer
Technical Lead at Sortition Foundation
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHamish Downer is a Technical Lead with over two decades of hands-on software engineering and DevOps experience, currently leading automation for a Democratic Lottery project. He spans the full stack—from provisioning and monitoring infrastructure to automating CI/CD pipelines and crafting interactive front ends and data visualisations—helping teams ship updates confidently and quickly. Previously a Principal Solutions Developer at Linguamatics, he led release engineering and next‑gen NLP product work while building internal tools that smoothed production pipelines. An active contributor to open source projects like cookiecutter and django-simple-history, he brings practical expertise in backend systems, test automation and crypto-enabled email workflows. Based in Cambridge, Hamish combines deep systems knowledge (from embedded C and smartcard work to managing 50–100 servers with Puppet) with a knack for turning complex operational processes into single-command deployments.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
King's School, ChesterMaster’s Degree Engineering - Electronics and Information Sciences, Master’s Degree Engineering - Electronics and Information Sciences at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
16,799reputation
6.8mreached
66answers
43questions
encoding
top-5%
text-files
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tmux
top-1%
django-forms
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user-input
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python
top-5%
Github Skills (39)
unit-testing10
git10
pytest10
python10
sendmail10
django10
send-email10
testing10
modeler10
modello10
pg10
ruby10
e-mail10
cryptography10
gnupg10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
sup-heliotrope/sup
Oct 2010 - Feb 2013
A curses threads-with-tags style email client (mailing list: supmua@googlegroups.com)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:76 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Hamish significantly contributed to the `sup` email client by adding features related to cryptographic signing and encryption using GPG. They implemented an account setting option for specifying the GPG key and refined the handling of encrypted messages, including dealing with different line endings. Furthermore, the user migrated the crypto functionality to use the GPGME gem and enhanced the signature verification process, ensuring proper error handling and better user feedback. The user's work touches several critical parts of the email client's backend with features such as encryption, account settings, and crypto management.
mailing-listemailmailingrubyemail-client
cookiecutter/cookiecutter
Aug 2013 - Aug 2013
A cross-platform command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates), e.g. Python package projects, C projects.
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Hamish primarily contributed to the `cookiecutter` project by implementing and testing a new feature that allows users to specify a branch to checkout after cloning a template repository. They added new functionality to the `git_clone` function, integrating the branch specification. Furthermore, the user wrote new tests to validate this new functionality, focusing on correct behavior of the `git clone` and checkout operations. The user also addressed compatibility issues, modifying the code to support older Python versions and parse subprocess output for Python 3.
cliproject-templatespythoncommand-line-utilitydeveloper-tools
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