Phil Ostler
Frontend Engineering Lead at Open Source
United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPhil Ostler is a Frontend Engineering Lead with 15+ years’ experience delivering production-grade web and UI systems for startups, charities and enterprise clients across Europe and the US. He blends hands-on engineering — shipping TypeScript, React and Next.js apps — with team leadership, having led frontend architecture, hiring and cross-timezone teams as Head of Frontend at Smartia and now at IndyKite. Phil has a track record of speeding delivery and reducing bugs through pragmatic shifts such as introducing GraphQL, Storybook, TypeScript and Cypress E2E testing, and has driven measurable performance wins like a 75% deployment size reduction at Attestant. An active open-source author, he created the widely used rspec-sidekiq testing gem (500+ stars) and contributes across JS and Ruby projects, reflecting deep testing and backend familiarity. Comfortable operating remotely long before it was common, he prioritises team wellbeing, clear processes and design-system thinking to scale frontend delivery. Outside work he balances endurance sport with engineering, describing himself as an engineer, duathlete and aspiring triathlete.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Software Engineering, Bachelor's Degree Software Engineering at Aberystwyth UniversityHigh School BTEC National Diploma Computer Studies, High School BTEC National Diploma Computer Studies at Saltash College
English
Stackoverflow
447reputation
48kreached
3answers
9questions
Github Skills (13)
testing10
rspec10
matcher10
sidekiq10
test-automation10
ruby10
actionscript6
scheduling6
stub6
cas6
jruby6
background-process6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
wspurgin/rspec-sidekiq
Mar 2013 - Jan 2014
RSpec for Sidekiq
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:4 releases, 118 commits, 28 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily focused on enhancing the testing capabilities of the `rspec-sidekiq` gem. They implemented new matchers for testing Sidekiq job attributes, including queue, retry settings, and uniqueness. The user added and improved existing matchers, such as the `have_enqueued_job` and `be_retryable` matchers, to provide more comprehensive test coverage. The contributions demonstrate a clear focus on ensuring the reliability and testability of Sidekiq-related code.
minitestrailsrubyrspecsidekiq
ForgeRock/crest-js
Nov 2018 - Feb 2021
Lightweight Library for Communicating With ForgeRock CREST APIs.
Contributions:8 releases, 1 PR, 48 pushes in 2 years 3 months
apicrestcrest-apijavascriptforgerock
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