John Carter
Head Of Development at PHQ AKL
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Carter is a seasoned Head of Development with 12+ years of experience building and leading teams that deliver robust Python/Django web applications and API backends. He combines deep backend expertise—evidenced by meaningful contributions to notable open-source projects like drf-yasg and django-constance—with strong devops, testing and automation skills to keep production systems reliable and maintainable. Comfortable translating business requirements into pragmatic technical designs, he has led replatforms, PCI-compliant eCommerce projects and cloud-native initiatives on Google Cloud. A hands-on mentor and communicator, he routinely bridges the gap between engineers and non-technical stakeholders while still contributing code and CI improvements. Less obvious: his early background in high-performance C/C++ systems and building CI/package pipelines gives him a rare appreciation for both low-level performance and scalable web architecture.
12 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
MSci, Physics with Space Science, Upper Second (2:1), MSci, Physics with Space Science, Upper Second (2:1) at University College London, U. of London
Stackoverflow
54,505reputation
6.1mreached
330answers
43questions
mysql
top-5%
colors
top-5%
debugging
top-1%
memcached
top-5%
docker
top-5%
undefined
top-5%
Github Skills (53)
debugging10
npm10
pytest10
apidoc10
python10
django10
testing10
django-rest10
data-serialization10
swagger10
serialization10
vector10
gdb10
php10
api10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
jazzband/django-constance
Mar 2016 - Mar 2019
Dynamic Django settings.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 9 PRs, 38 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:John contributed to the django-constance project by enhancing its flexibility and functionality. Their work included making the `CONSTANCE_ADDITIONAL_FIELDS` more versatile, allowing for tuple-based configurations and optional config dictionaries. They also fixed documentation issues and updated the example application, including adding migrations and incorporating the `CONSTANCE_ADDITIONAL_FIELDS` to the example app. Furthermore, they added and implemented command line functionality.
pythondjangodjango-settingsdjango-adminsettings
axnsan12/drf-yasg
Mar 2018 - Aug 2018
Automated generation of real Swagger/OpenAPI 2.0 schemas from Django REST Framework code.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 10 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:John contributed significantly to the `drf-yasg` project, which is a Django REST Framework (DRF) Swagger/OpenAPI documentation generator. Their work focused on enhancing the library's ability to handle various DRF fields, including `HiddenField` and `SlugRelatedField`, improving the accuracy of the generated API documentation. They also addressed issues related to parameter ordering in URLs and added support for `SerializerMethodField`. These contributions involved code modifications in multiple files, including core inspector files, serializers, and documentation, demonstrating a strong understanding of DRF and API documentation generation.
redocpythonopenapi-specificationdjangodocumentation-generator
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.