Pat Allan
Staff Engineer at Flying Sphinx
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
RockstarPat Allan is a Staff Engineer and founder with 18 years of experience building resilient web platforms, APIs, and search-driven SaaS. Based in Melbourne, he runs Flying Sphinx—providing Sphinx-based full‑text search on Heroku—while leading engineering at Covidence.org and freelancing for notable clients like Culture Amp and Envato. He brings deep Ruby/Rails expertise and a proven track record contributing to foundational open-source projects such as Rails, Devise, and RSpec, with attention to compatibility, tests, and library internals. Pat often focuses on subtle correctness and developer ergonomics—e.g., frozen string literal compatibility and interplay between authentication modules—rather than flashy features. Comfortable across back-end, front-end, and infrastructure, he pairs pragmatic engineering with direct client collaboration. Outside work he’s a gelato aficionado and pancake maker, hinting at a patient, detail-oriented approach.
18 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
16,176reputation
660kreached
457answers
11questions
ruby
top-5%
full-text-search
top-1%
postgresql
top-5%
lucene
top-1%
mysql
top-1%
ruby-on-rails
top-1%
Github Skills (43)
lucene10
form-builder10
ruby-rails10
devise10
mysql10
hashicorp-vault10
testing10
rspec10
user-authentication10
authentication10
rails10
ruby10
backup10
api10
vault10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
heartcombo/devise
Jul 2010 - Dec 2017
Flexible authentication solution for Rails with Warden.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 5 PRs, 6 comments in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Pat primarily contributed to the internal workings of the Devise authentication library for Ruby on Rails, focusing on mailer customizations and ensuring proper interaction between different authentication modules. They addressed issues related to timeoutable and rememberable modules, ensuring these features function correctly together. Additionally, the user updated the codebase to maintain compatibility with newer Ruby versions and ensured the use of frozen string literals. These changes suggest a focus on core library functionality, bug fixes, and code quality.
wardenrailsrails-engineauthenticationruby
backup/backup
Aug 2011 - Jan 2012
Easy full stack backup operations on UNIX-like systems.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:23 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Pat's primary contribution involves adding support for Ninefold, a cloud storage provider, to the backup application. This includes implementing the necessary classes and methods for interacting with Ninefold's API, as well as writing specifications and unit tests. The user's work allows users to back up data to Ninefold, integrating the service with existing backup operations on UNIX-like systems. This demonstrates an extension of the application's storage capabilities.
unixmysqlfull-stackrubyunix-like
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