Robert Haines
Director Of Research IT at The University of Manchester
England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Haines is a seasoned research IT leader with 22 years of experience, currently serving as Director of Research IT at The University of Manchester and an Honorary Lecturer. He progressed through technical and managerial roles from Senior Software Engineer to Associate Director, combining hands-on software engineering with strategic oversight of research computing services. An active open-source contributor, he has improved test infrastructure for the widely used rubyzip library and enhanced command-line video-tracking tools, reflecting attention to robust testing and reproducible research outputs. Based in the UK with a BSc in Computer Science from Manchester, he blends academic engagement with practical delivery, often surfacing subtle reliability improvements—like file-permission and timestamp handling—that prevent flaky research workflows.
22 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Hons) Computer Science, BSc (Hons) Computer Science at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
127reputation
4kreached
8answers
1question
Github Skills (23)
unit-testing10
c-language10
command-line-interface10
ruby10
command-line-utility10
command-line10
minitest10
command-line-tool10
cprogramming-language10
test-automation10
opencv9
fileio9
file-access9
file-handling9
file-processing9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
rubyzip/rubyzip
Jun 2014 - Nov 2022
Official Rubyzip repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 releases, 14 reviews, 366 commits in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the rubyzip library. Their commits focused on updating tests to utilize the MiniTest 5.x API, ensuring tests are compatible with new versions of the testing framework. They also refactored test code to improve cleanup processes and ensured file permissions and timestamps are correctly set. Finally, the user added tests for specific functionality in the library.
rubyzipencryptionrubyaes-encryptionzip
gnebehay/CppMT
Jul 2015 - Jul 2015
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 7 PRs, 2 comments in 15 days
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to the command-line tool's functionality by adding new features and modifying existing ones. The user added the ability to skip frames and milliseconds at the start of video files, including argument parsing and error handling. They also integrated an output file option, which was then extended to output tracking data to a CSV file, including rotated bounding box data and active point counts.
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