Nik Wakelin
Founder at Sterling AI
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNik Wakelin is a founder and seasoned engineering leader with 17 years of hands-on experience building web and mobile products from early-stage startups to scale-ups. Based in Wellington, New Zealand, he has repeatedly founded and scaled engineering teams and companies—most recently leading engineering at Portainer.io and launching Sterling AI after founding Breve and other ventures. Technically rooted in Ruby/Rails and APIs, his open-source contributions include meaningful enhancements to Netflix’s fast_jsonapi serializer, improving relationship links and lazy-loading behavior. He blends product-focused engineering with operator experience, having shipped integrations, developer tools, and data-driven features across multiple exits and acquisitions. Known for turning developer workflows into productised services, he combines pragmatic architecture with a founder’s bias for rapid iteration.
17 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington
Stackoverflow
498reputation
25kreached
7answers
6questions
Github Skills (14)
ruby10
rspec10
data-serialization10
json-api10
serialization10
lib9
dry6
objective-c6
emberjs6
ajax6
refactoring6
uikit6
iphone6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
Netflix/fast_jsonapi
Aug 2018 - Oct 2018
No Longer Maintained - A lightning fast JSON:API serializer for Ruby Objects.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 7 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Nik primarily contributed to the `fast_jsonapi` library by implementing features related to JSON:API serialization. They introduced the ability to specify links within relationships, enhancing the library's compliance with the JSON:API specification. Furthermore, they added a `lazy_load_data` option, enabling more flexible handling of relationship data loading in JSON responses. The changes included modifications to core serialization logic and the addition of testing to validate the new features.
apijsonapilightningrubyjson-api-serializer
MindscapeHQ/raygun4ruby
Jul 2013 - Jul 2021
The Ruby & Ruby on Rails provider for Raygun
Contributions:6 releases, 7 reviews, 116 commits in 8 years
raygunruby-on-railsbreadcrumbssinatraprovider
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