Iain Ballard
Lead Developer at eWater Services
Wales, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIain Ballard is a pragmatic lead developer with 14 years of hands-on experience building and stabilising large-scale systems across media encoding, web platforms, and embedded devices. He combines technical breadth—ranging from high-performance .NET serialization work to video transcoding pipelines—with a passion for improving developer workflow, tooling, and team practices. Previously a principal engineer and team lead at consumer and enterprise firms, he excels at guiding cross-skilled teams, mentoring engineers, and driving product growth under demanding conditions. An active open-source contributor, he has strengthened test suites and serialization behavior in notable .NET projects such as NSubstitute and ServiceStack.Text. Based in Wales, he favors pragmatic solutions over dogma and is comfortable diving into unfamiliar domains to apply the best-fit technology.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Physics, Pure Mathematics, English, Physics, Pure Mathematics, English at Various
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
json10
serializer10
mstest10
testing10
dotnet-new10
dotnet10
teste10
netframework10
mocks10
mocker10
dotnet-core10
netcore10
csharp10
ui-testing10
user-interface9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ServiceStack/ServiceStack.Text
Aug 2012 - Sep 2012
.NET's fastest JSON, JSV and CSV Text Serializers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 commits in 24 days
Contributions summary:Iain primarily focused on improving the ServiceStack.Text library, a high-performance JSON, JSV, and CSV serializer. Their contributions included refactoring code, adding and refining tests related to JSON serialization, interface handling, and dynamic proxy implementations. The user also introduced a configuration setting for preferring interfaces during serialization, impacting how the library handles type information and serialization behavior. Further work included addressing issues related to IDictionary serialization and specific failure cases, leading to refinements of the serialization and deserialization processes.
csvpocoserializersfastestc-sharp
nsubstitute/NSubstitute
Jan 2013 - Jan 2013
A friendly substitute for .NET mocking libraries.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Iain primarily contributed to the test suite of the NSubstitute library. Their work involved adding new tests to ensure correct behavior of generic methods and interfaces, especially in edge cases with derived types. They also addressed existing pending tests by marking them explicit. Additionally, the user made small improvements and adjustments to the existing test framework to ensure stability and proper test execution.
dotnetdot-netstubstestingsubstitute
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