Raul Gallegos is a pragmatic CTO and engineering leader with 13 years of experience designing and operating large-scale web and data systems from Arequipa, Peru. He has led teams through cloud migrations, IaC and GitOps adoptions, and built scalable crawling and data-pipeline platforms using Python, Scrapy, AWS, Terraform and Kubernetes. A hands-on architect, Raul has driven standardization across full stacks, introduced ephemeral review environments via GitHub Actions, and owned security and release practices at startups and mid-stage companies. He is an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects like Scrapy and dateparser, where his work improved proxy handling, retry logic and multilingual date parsing—evidence of a focus on reliability and internationalization. Beyond engineering, he co-founded initiatives to mentor competitive programmers in Peru and runs a local startup hub, reflecting a commitment to community building and talent development.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, Computer Science, Master’s Degree, Computer Science at Universidad Católica San Pablo
Scrapy, a fast high-level web crawling & scraping framework for Python.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:10 commits, 10 PRs, 1 push in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Raul primarily contributed to the Scrapy framework, focusing on enhancements and bug fixes related to HTTP proxy handling and retry mechanisms. Their work included adding configurable encoding options for proxy authentication and resolving Py3 compatibility issues within the `HttpProxyMiddleware` and `RetryMiddleware`. Additionally, the user modified the ordering of downloader middlewares and updated the documentation for the `FormRequest` class, demonstrating a focus on both core functionality and usability.
Contributions:12 commits, 5 PRs, 6 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Raul focused on adding and improving tests for the `dateparser` library, specifically targeting date parsing in French, Turkish, and Czech languages. The contributions involved writing new tests and modifying existing ones within the `tests/` directory, covering freshness and time parsing scenarios. Their work ensured the correct handling of various date formats and cultural variations, including specific language simplifications for "today" and time representations.
pythonpython-parserreadablehuman-readabledates
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