Karl Freeman
Chief Technology Officer at Zapnito
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarl Freeman is a London-based CTO with 15 years of engineering and leadership experience, currently steering technology and product strategy at Zapnito after progressing through senior engineering and executive roles there since 2016. He combines a product-first mindset with deep Ruby on Rails and frontend experience, having contributed to the popular Middleman static site generator and maintained deployment tooling for real-world workflows. Karl is hands-on: he still writes and refines code, tests, and documentation, with a particular eye for maintainability and deployment automation. His background spans startup CTO roles and engineering leadership in health tech, giving him a pragmatic approach to scaling teams and systems. Notably, his open-source work emphasizes developer experience and clear documentation—an often-overlooked driver of long-term product success.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BTEC ND, Graphic Design, Triple Distinction, BTEC ND, Graphic Design, Triple Distinction at Oxford & Cherwell Valley College
English
Stackoverflow
578reputation
166kreached
17answers
2questions
Github Skills (24)
git10
static-site-generator10
ftp10
cicd10
erb10
ruby10
rsync10
html10
sftp10
middleman10
documentation10
haml9
sass9
css8
community-management8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
karlfreeman/middleman-deploy
May 2014 - Aug 2015
Deploy a middleman built site over rsync, ftp, stfp, or git (e.g. gh-pages on github).
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:19 commits, 2 PRs, 4 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Karl primarily contributed to the project's deployment process and configuration. Their commits focused on modifying the deployment methods for the middleman-deploy tool, including updates to rsync, sftp, ftp, and git deployment strategies. They also introduced and updated build steps and overall project setup for easier maintenance and future release of the package.
ftprsync
middleman/middleman
Feb 2013 - Mar 2014
Hand-crafted frontend development
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:41 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Karl primarily worked on the Middleman static site generator, contributing to both core functionality and testing. They implemented and tested new features like the `capture_html` helper and addressed issues related to content rendering and escaping HTML. They also implemented Rubocop and addressed whitespace issues, indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability within the project.
front-end-developmentstatic-site-generatormiddleman
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