Mark Rickerby
Lecturer at UC School of Product Design
Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Rickerby is an experienced software architect, educator and founder with 18 years building scalable web platforms, APIs and developer tools from startups to enterprise. Based in Canterbury, New Zealand, he combines hands-on backend engineering—contributing to BigCommerce’s Stores API and core work on the SilverStripe framework—with product leadership roles that turned agency practices into SaaS businesses. As a lecturer and former Head of Product, he mentors teams in design-led engineering, bounded-context architecture and pragmatic testing while still shipping code and refactoring legacy systems. His open-source contributions show a knack for practical plumbing—HTTP clients, API endpoints and robust error handling—rather than flashy libraries. Mark’s background in philosophy and computer science informs a storytelling approach to systems design, treating architecture as a narrative that guides teams and users alike.
18 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy; History; Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy; History; Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington
Github Skills (14)
json10
http10
php10
web-framework10
silverstripe10
api10
curl10
apidoc10
form-validation9
api-client9
bigcommerce9
error-handling9
debug8
debugging8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
bigcommerce/bigcommerce-api-php
Aug 2011 - Apr 2014
Connect PHP applications with the Bigcommerce Platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:108 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Mark implemented and refactored the HTTP connection support within the PHP API client. They added methods for handling HTTP requests (GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE) and managing responses, including error handling and redirect following. Furthermore, the user worked on integrating several Bigcommerce API endpoints, including product, category, brand, order, customer, and option set resources. They updated the API to use a helper method to make it easier to integrate new functions and deprecated several outdated functions.
api-clientphpbigcommercephp-applications
silverstripe/silverstripe-framework
Feb 2008 - Apr 2009
Silverstripe Framework, the MVC framework that powers Silverstripe CMS
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily contributed to fixing bugs and improving the Silverstripe Framework. Their work included resolving typos in documentation, implementing and refining error handling mechanisms, and addressing issues related to object relationships and form validation. Furthermore, the user made improvements by removing redundant code and optimizing certain processes within the framework. The user appears to have a good understanding of the framework's internal workings.
cmsphppowersframeworksilverstripe
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