Richard Vowles
Developer Experience Engineer at Flux Federation
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Vowles is a Developer Experience Engineer with 16 years building cloud-native, microservice-driven systems and developer tooling from Auckland, New Zealand. He combines hands-on expertise in Java, Node/TypeScript, Kubernetes, GCP/AWS and CI/CD with a proven track record of moving teams from release-based workflows to continuous delivery. Richard is an active open-source contributor who has improved build and plugin packaging in notable projects like Grails and enhanced ORM maintainability in Ebean, reflecting a deep focus on reliable build/deploy processes. He’s delivered across platform, backend and mobile (Flutter) domains and enjoys mentoring teams to improve productivity and automation. An often-overlooked strength is his background in developer advocacy and training—he routinely bridges developer experience, QA and SRE concerns to make software delivery faster and safer.
16 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (Incomplete), Bachelor of Arts (Incomplete) at University of Auckland
Stackoverflow
266reputation
33kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
grails10
groovy10
plugin-development10
databases10
ebean10
java10
javas10
orm10
database10
testing9
mstest9
teste9
jtest9
sql9
kotlin8
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
ebean-orm/ebean
Apr 2013 - Mar 2014
Ebean ORM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 21 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the development of the Ebean ORM, focusing on enhancing its core functionalities. Their work included refactoring DDL generation into a plugin architecture and adding support for a WAR classpath entry. They also migrated the project from JUL to SLF4j for logging and addressed an issue with duplicate SQL generation during database setup. These changes reflect a focus on improving the ORM's maintainability and deployment flexibility.
sqlserverhanaebeanjdbcorm
apache/grails-core
Sep 2012 - Sep 2012
The Grails Web Application Framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 3 days
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the Grails web framework by addressing issues related to plugin packaging and resource handling. Their work included modifications to the `PluginDescriptorGenerator` and `PluginPackager` classes, indicating a focus on improving the build and deployment processes for Grails plugins. These changes involve ensuring files are correctly excluded from binary plugin packages and resolving issues with how resources are handled during plugin creation, resulting in more robust and accurate plugin generation. The commits also involved the addition of testing scenarios to validate plugin exclusion behavior.
groovyweb-applicationframeworkweb-application-frameworkapplication-framework
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