Richard Willars - Founder at Uprooting

Richard Willars

Founder at Uprooting

England, United Kingdom

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Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

Richard Willars is a founder and seasoned software engineer with 11 years building scalable web and serverless platforms across startups and enterprise clients in the UK. He led architecture and implementation as CTO at Waggel, designing an AWS-based serverless microservice stack with Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB/MySQL and React, and now runs Uprooting, the UK’s first all-in-one moving platform for agents and consumers. A pragmatic full-stack developer, he has shipped high-throughput systems (photo uploader handling millions of uploads per day) and introduced A/B testing and analytics at scale. Richard is an active open-source contributor focused on front-end quality and test automation, notably improving Jest coverage and maintainability for the popular Uppy file uploader. His background spans rapid prototyping to product leadership, combining hands-on coding with product-driven entrepreneurship. He often blends deep engineering detail with customer-facing product thinking, turning complex workflows into simple, reliable user experiences.

11 years of coding experience

19 years of employment as a software developer

A Levels, Computing, Systems & Control, General Studies, A Levels, Computing, Systems & Control, General Studies at Ashby Grammar School

BSc (Hons), Computer Science: Web Development, BSc (Hons), Computer Science: Web Development at University of Staffordshire

Github Skills (9)

javascript10

uppy10

jestjs10

react10

test-automation10

front-end-development9

file-upload8

modular7

modularity7

Programming languages (6)

TypeScriptJavaCoffeeScriptC++RustJavaScript

Github contributions (5)

transloadit/uppy

Aug 2017 - Jan 2018

The next open source file uploader for web browsers :dog:

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer

Contributions:24 commits, 25 PRs, 65 comments in 5 months

Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on improving the test coverage and maintainability of the `uppy` repository. They added comprehensive Jest tests for core functionalities, covering components like `Core`, `Utils`, and `Redux`. Additionally, the user refactored code, renaming functions, and removing unused parameters to simplify the codebase. Furthermore, they implemented tests for info messages and ensured compatibility with the existing features and overall functionality of the project.

dropboxwebbrowsertusuppybrowsers

richardwillars/thinglator-driver-lifx

Jun 2016 - Mar 2018

Contributions:38 PRs, 45 pushes, 10 branches in 1 year 8 months

lifx

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