Paul Fenwick
Public Speaker And Freedom Loving Scientist at Perl Training Australia
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Fenwick is a veteran software engineer and public speaker with 26 years of hands-on experience in backend development, DevOps, and test automation, currently based in Melbourne. He runs Perl Training Australia and has a long history of playful, pragmatic contributions to open source—improving tooling like Taskwarrior and integrating issue trackers via BugWarrior, and enhancing build and CI workflows for the Kerbal Space Program's CKAN metadata. His work spans game development (Cataclysm DDA), automation scripts for mod tooling, and production engineering at organizations including Valve and UN OCHA, showing an ability to move between hobbyist projects and high-stakes environments. Known as a "benevolent troublemaker," he combines deep technical craft with advocacy for freedom and reproducible tooling, often favoring pragmatic Perl and automation solutions. Colleagues appreciate his knack for quietly refactoring messy codebases into maintainable systems and for improving test infrastructures that make teams more reliable.
26 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Melbourne
English, perl, c#, python
Stackoverflow
6,001reputation
728kreached
39answers
2questions
perl
top-1%
optimization
top-5%
Github Skills (44)
unit-testing10
c-language10
python10
scripting10
testing10
configuration-management10
command-line-interface10
perl10
cicd10
cl10
taskwarrior10
script10
build-automation10
yaml10
command-line10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
KSP-CKAN/NetKAN
Nov 2014 - Apr 2016
Metadata files used by the NetKAN/CKAN indexer for KSP
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:298 commits, 171 PRs, 93 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on improving the build and testing processes within the repository. They added and updated build scripts, integrating testing frameworks, and ensuring that tests run before other processes. Additionally, the user updated NetKAN tests to check for licenses, identifiers, and correct spec versions, and improved the CI/Jenkins pipeline. Their contributions streamlined the development workflow and improved code quality.
indexerckanmetadataksp
CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA
Apr 2019 - Aug 2022
Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 reviews, 123 commits, 144 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the game's back-end logic, focusing on improving NPC behavior and game mechanics. They implemented changes to NPC trading, allowing for more accurate exchange values and addressing issues with vehicle inventories. Additionally, the user modified NPC auto-eating behavior based on hunger levels, improving NPC interaction and reducing player dependence. The commits also included fixing move assignment in C++ and several style fixes.
gametrinitycorecataclysmset-inazerothcore
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