Russell Howe
Ld. Infrastructure Engineer at T. Rowe Price
England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRussell Howe is a London-based lead infrastructure engineer with nine years focused on making systems reliable and maintainable across finance and government sectors. At T. Rowe Price he leads infrastructure efforts, building the plumbing that lets engineering teams deliver production services. His background in SRE and systems ops at the Government Digital Service and Moonfruit reflects a pragmatic, service-oriented approach to reliability and incident readiness. An active open-source contributor, he has improved core Java tooling and libraries—contributing to high-profile projects like Apache Maven and Dropwizard—by modernizing code, tightening tests, and applying Java 8+ practices. Known for succinct hands-on fixes (hence the wry “I delete things” tagline), he prioritizes clarity, refactoring, and maintainability over complexity. He holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Manchester and brings a steady, improvement-driven mindset to large, production-critical systems.
9 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science, Computer Science, Computer Science at The University of Manchester
Github Skills (19)
testing10
maven-plugin10
java10
stream10
javas10
eventbus10
maven10
refactoring10
build-management10
mockito10
rest8
security8
api-design7
api7
documentation7
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
dropwizard/dropwizard
Nov 2020 - Sep 2022
A damn simple library for building production-ready RESTful web services.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 reviews, 234 commits, 161 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Russell primarily focused on improving the code quality and maintainability of the Dropwizard project. Their contributions included refactoring by removing deprecated APIs and upgrading to newer versions, such as replacing deprecated Mockito methods and upgrading to a new property naming strategy. They also improved the documentation and addressed code style issues. In general, the user's work demonstrated a focus on code cleanliness and best practices.
restrestfulwebservicedropwizardjava
apache/maven-compiler-plugin
May 2019 - Sep 2021
Apache Maven Compiler Plugin
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 11 PRs, 13 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Russell primarily focused on improving the Apache Maven Compiler Plugin's code quality and functionality. Their contributions include refactoring code to use Java 7 type inference and addressing null checks. They also addressed code smells by initializing variables and replacing StringBuilder with String.format(). Furthermore, they upgraded Mockito and streamlined the inclusion/exclusion logic for source files, indicating a focus on maintainability and testing.
maven-compiler-pluginjavabuild-managementmavenmaven-plugins
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