Neal Todd is a seasoned technology leader with 13 years of professional experience, currently serving as Head of Systems and Principal Engineer at Torchbox in the Greater Oxford area. He combines hands-on backend development expertise with systems leadership, driving reliability and maintainability across web projects and teams. Neal is an active open-source contributor to prominent Django ecosystems—improving translation tooling in django-rosetta and enhancing code quality across the widely used Wagtail CMS—showing a pragmatic focus on developer experience. His background includes a PhD in Astrophysics from Imperial College London, reflecting strong analytical rigor and a research-minded approach to engineering problems. Colleagues describe him as someone who balances meticulous code hygiene with practical product needs, often surfacing small but impactful fixes that improve long-term system health. He brings a rare mix of academic depth and production-proven engineering leadership to web and CMS platforms.
13 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysics at Imperial College London
A Django content management system focused on flexibility and user experience
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:84 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Neal primarily focused on linting and code style improvements across various Python files within the Wagtail CMS. These changes involved cleaning up code in the `wagtailadmin`, `wagtailcore`, `wagtaildocs`, `wagtailembeds`, `wagtailimages`, `wagtailredirects`, and `wagtailsearch` modules. The user also made improvements to JavaScript files within `wagtailadmin`. These changes demonstrate a focus on code quality and maintainability across multiple areas of the Wagtail project.
Rosetta is a Django application that eases the translation process of your Django projects
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 4 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Neal contributed to the Django-Rosetta project by addressing bugs and improving functionality. Their work includes fixing an issue with invalid page parameters, making MO file compilation optional, and resolving an IndexError in the translation view. They also refactored the code to improve the user experience by removing the 2dp float formatting of the percentage translated value.
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