Richard North
Principal Software Engineer at Skyscanner
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarRichard North is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building developer-focused tooling and cloud-native test infrastructure, currently leading devex efforts at Skyscanner from London. He is the creator of Testcontainers and has deep hands-on expertise in back-end systems and test automation, including implementing a virtual JDBC driver to simplify containerized database testing. His career spans senior engineering and leadership roles—including CTO at AtomicJar and Chief Engineer at Deloitte Digital—where he combined delivery, architecture and developer experience. Known for improving observability and reliability, he brings pragmatic engineering, open-source stewardship, and a knack for turning complex integration challenges into reproducible developer workflows.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
English, Japanese
Stackoverflow
442reputation
28kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
unit-testing10
mysql10
jdbc10
java10
javas10
test-container10
test-automation10
postgresql9
dockers9
docker9
integration-testing9
tomcat6
elasticsearch6
junit6
dockerfile6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
testcontainers/testcontainers-java
Apr 2015 - Mar 2022
Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:14 releases, 400 reviews, 1178 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:Richard implemented an experimental virtual JDBC driver for database interaction within the test suite, focusing on containerized database interactions. Their work involved developing and integrating a virtual JDBC driver and test classes, suggesting contributions to the core backend infrastructure of the project. The user also refactored and enhanced logging across several modules, demonstrating attention to test infrastructure and debugging. These efforts reflect a focus on ensuring test reliability and simplifying database interaction.
junit-testsjunitinstancestest-automationbrowsers
rnorth/gh-tidy-notifications
Dec 2021 - Jun 2024
`gh` CLI extension to tidy GitHub notifications
Contributions:2 PRs, 4 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 6 months
gh-clinotificationstidygithub-notificationscli
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