Neal Brooks
Software Engineer, Backend Services, Proton VPN at Proton | Privacy by Default
Sevenoaks, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNeal Brooks is a pragmatic software engineer and technical leader with 11+ years building scalable backend services and service-oriented architectures, now focused on Proton VPN’s privacy-first mission. He brings deep hands-on expertise in DDD, CQRS, Event Sourcing and TDD, having led teams and shaped SDLC practices from onboarding to delivery at companies like Lendable and MyBuilder. Neal is a Serverless PHP advocate and active open-source contributor—improving Bref and Async AWS to better run PHP on AWS Lambda and extend async AWS client capabilities. He pairs architectural rigor with practical engineering: measurable monitoring, robust testing, and clear stakeholder communication to align systems with business outcomes. As an organiser of Symfony UK meetups and internal developer conferences, he invests in developer learning and culture as much as code. Outside work he blends platform-level contributions with pragmatic product engineering, often surfacing subtle operational improvements (e.g., secure session/cookie handling in serverless environments) that reduce real user risk.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Natural Sciences, Bachelor's Degree Natural Sciences at The Open UniversityCollege, College at Orpington CollegeHigh School, High School at Eltham College
Stackoverflow
2,621reputation
237kreached
50answers
0questions
php
top-5%
amazon-ec2
top-1%
nginx
top-1%
Github Skills (24)
session-management10
async10
aws-lambda10
aws-sdk10
php10
http-cookie10
amazon-ec210
aws10
symfony10
symfony-ux10
serverless10
nginx10
phpunit9
bref9
html6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
brefphp/bref
Jul 2018 - Aug 2022
Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 17 PRs, 117 comments in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Neal focused on enhancing session handling and cookie management within the Symfony adapter for the Bref project. Their contributions involved adding session cookie retrieval and setting mechanisms, including setting the `httponly` and `samesite=lax` attributes for added security. Furthermore, the user refactored the session handling logic into private methods for improved code organization and implemented support for the `HTTP_HOST` server variable. These improvements enhance the project's functionality within the serverless PHP environment.
lambda-layeraws-lambdaphpserverlessbref
async-aws/aws
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
AWS SDK with readable code and async responses
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 7 commits, 7 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Neal primarily focused on implementing and adding various AWS CodeCommit client methods to interact with the AWS CodeCommit service, including operations to get blobs, branches, differences, and commit information. They also added functionality to manage repository triggers by adding methods to put repository triggers and implementing methods related to create, delete, and list repositories. Additionally, they worked on implementing and modifying the AWS IAM client to create, delete, and manage user-specific policies and credentials, increasing the overall functionality of the project.
readableaws-lambdaaws-sdksdkaws
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