Rich Churcher
Platform Engineer (contract)
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRich Churcher is a platform engineer with 11 years of experience building reliable, observable infrastructure and developer tooling across startups and scale-ups in New Zealand. He blends hands-on platform work—Terraform, AWS, CI/CD, containerised deployments and Postgres ops—with a pragmatic focus on developer experience and automation. Comfortable across front-end, back-end and systems, he’s contributed to open-source projects from D3-based visualisation tweaks to Rust game-engine examples and Node crypto bindings, showing a knack for both UI polish and low-level correctness. Prior to engineering he worked as a pediatric critical-care flight nurse, a background that informs his calm problem-solving and emphasis on safety and team communication. Currently contracting on platform initiatives, he enjoys translating complex operational needs into simple developer workflows. Colleagues value him as an engineer who can “talk to humans” while shipping dependable systems.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Nursing Bachelor of Nursing, Bachelor of Nursing Bachelor of Nursing at Otago Polytechnic | Te PūkengaWeb Development, Web Development at Enspiral Dev Academy
Stackoverflow
7,491reputation
1.9mreached
201answers
28questions
sql
top-5%
postgresql
top-5%
react-router-dom
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (36)
password-hash10
javascript10
react-native10
game-engine10
bevy10
front-end-development10
cryptography10
html10
libsodium10
hash10
nodejs10
rust10
game-development10
d3js10
react10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
jsdf/react-native-htmlview
Jul 2017 - Jan 2018
A React Native component which renders HTML content as native views
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 38 PRs, 23 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Rich primarily contributed to the React Native component for rendering HTML content. Their work included bug fixes, such as resolving issues with ordered lists and default styles. They also added new features, such as handling long press events on links, and enhanced the test suite by adding new test cases and incorporating StyleSheet.flatten for improved style management.
react-componentreacthtml-rendererreact-nativereact-native-component
bevyengine/bevy
May 2024 - Feb 2025
A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:68 reviews, 101 PRs, 240 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Rich primarily focused on enhancing the Bevy game engine's example code. Their contributions include refactoring mouse input handling in various examples to use the new `AccumulatedMouseMotion` and `AccumulatedMouseScroll` resources, as well as fixing linting issues. They also removed an outdated `OrthographicProjection.scale` property and replaced it with `scaling_mode` in several examples. Furthermore, the user added new examples for orthographic and perspective camera zooming and orbiting functionality.
data-drivenbevygamedevrustgame-development
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