Jakub Zalas
Director Software Architect Trainer at Kaffeine Labs Ltd
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJakub Zalas is a seasoned software engineer, architect and trainer with 20 years' experience helping teams modernize legacy PHP systems and adopt robust testing and agile practices. As Director at Kaffeine Labs he combines consultancy, hands-on architecture and training for public-sector and enterprise clients, and previously served on Symfony’s core team where he contributed widely to popular components like Routing, HttpFoundation and Console. He is a pragmatic advocate of gradual migration strategies, BDD/TDD, and CI/CD—often introducing these via training, pair programming and incremental refactors rather than big rewrites. An active open-source maintainer, his commits show deep attention to test coverage, localization/ICU issues and subtle framework internals that improve stability for thousands of apps. He also builds tooling and DevOps integration (e.g. phpqa Docker images and CI pipelines), bridging development and delivery. Based in the UK, he pairs technical leadership with public speaking and event organization, making him both a hands-on engineer and an effective team coach.
20 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.) Design and Exploitation of Computerized Information Systems, Master of Science (M.Sc.) Design and Exploitation of Computerized Information Systems at Poznan University of TechnologyEngineer's degree Database Design and Application Software, Engineer's degree Database Design and Application Software at PWSZ w Elblągu
Polish, English
Stackoverflow
35,982reputation
2.4mreached
565answers
2questions
doctrine-orm
top-1%
tdd
top-5%
routes
top-5%
selenium
top-5%
redirect
top-5%
twig
top-5%
Github Skills (86)
url-routing10
testing10
command-line-interface10
http10
test-framework10
phpunit10
security10
automation10
symfony-ux10
i18n-js10
xpath10
composer10
symfony-component10
react-components10
static-analysis10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
jakzal/phpqa
Jul 2017 - Jan 2023
Docker image that provides static analysis tools for PHP
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:276 releases, 16 reviews, 887 commits in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jakub primarily contributed to setting up and enhancing the `phpqa` repository, a Docker image for PHP static analysis tools. They added and updated tools like deptrac, php-semver-checker, and psalm to the image, and incorporated php-code-fixer and php-code-analyzer. Furthermore, the user made changes to automate the installation of these tools and managed the build process. They also configured CI/CD support for Github Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, and ensuring the images are built as intended.
docker-imagephpqaphpcpdphpstancode-quality
symfony/intl
May 2013 - Dec 2020
Provides access to the localization data of the ICU library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Localization/Internationalization Specialist
Back-end Developer & Localization/Internationalization SpecialistContributions:29 commits in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jakub primarily contributed to the Symfony Intl component, focusing on maintaining and improving its localization data and functionality. Their work involved fixing class namespaces in annotations, updating tests to align with the behavior of the Intl extension, and updating ICU data to newer versions. They also addressed issues related to timezones and date formatting, and incorporated changes related to GMT and UTC split in ICU.
symfony-componenticu-libraryphpinternationalizationintl
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