Kris Leech
Technical Lead at Lavanda
Nottingham, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKris Leech is a seasoned technical lead with 17 years of experience building distributed, event-driven systems and evolving architectures to align with business strategy. He combines hands-on engineering in Ruby and Clojure with people-centric leadership—mentoring engineers, running communities of practice, and hiring from diverse pools to grow high-performing teams. Kris has repeatedly driven measurable engineering excellence through modularisation, OKRs, and architectural decision records while navigating fuzzy problem spaces to deliver MVPs and product-market fit. He has practical experience with Kafka-based event architectures, OpenAPI-driven services, Ansible for provisioning, and pragmatic performance work such as replacing ORM with hand-written SQL. An active open-source contributor, he refactored the Ruby publish-subscribe library wisper to remove dependencies and add ergonomic features, reflecting a focus on maintainability and developer experience. Based in Nottingham, he champions a blame-free culture, healthy work-life balance, and remote-first collaboration.
17 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
High School A levels, High School A levels at Colonel Frank Seely, NottinghamAudio / Visual studies, Audio / Visual studies at Intermedia, NottinghamHigher National Diploma Sound Engineering, Higher National Diploma Sound Engineering at Confetti Studios, Nottingham
Stackoverflow
19,548reputation
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316answers
101questions
rake
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ruby
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rubygems
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validation
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ruby-on-rails
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Github Skills (31)
publish-subscribe10
scripting10
event-sourcing10
ruby10
script10
event-emitter10
theme-development10
rake10
sh10
eventing10
eventsource10
refactoring10
shell10
ruby-on-rails10
rubygems9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
krisleech/wisper
Mar 2013 - Mar 2020
A micro library providing Ruby objects with Publish-Subscribe capabilities
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 240 commits, 51 PRs in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Kris focused on refactoring the `wisper` library, a Ruby-based publish-subscribe system. Their work included removing dependencies, updating the version, adding new syntax sugar features like `.on`, `.respond_to`, and chained subscriptions. They also refactored code, added more usage examples and enhanced the codebase with the `:with` and `:prefix` arguments.
publisheventsrailspublish-subscriberuby
krisleech/wisper-activejob
Oct 2014 - Apr 2020
Provides asynchronous event publishing to Wisper using ActiveJob
Contributions:27 commits, 9 PRs, 18 pushes in 5 years 6 months
publishingasynchronousrubyactivejob
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