Shane Howley
Backend Lead at Genesis Block
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolShane Howley is a Backend Lead and software engineer with a Ph.D. in concurrent data structure algorithms and 13 years of experience building and scaling core technology for early-stage startups. He specializes in pragmatic, production-ready architectures—especially Elixir-based microservices and blockchain-enabled systems—and enjoys turning MVPs into resilient, scalable products with small cross-functional teams. His background spans privacy-focused peer-to-peer networks, digital banking on blockchain, and real-time game servers, giving him deep expertise in distributed systems, cryptography-adjacent design, and operational observability. An active contributor to open-source (including improvements to the official Elixir Sentry SDK), he combines academic rigor with hands-on engineering and a knack for selecting appropriate bleeding-edge technologies. Based in London, he brings a rare mix of research-led thinking and product-driven delivery, often surfacing non-obvious trade-offs between correctness, performance, and developer velocity.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
B.A. B.A.I, Electronic & Computer Engineering, B.A. B.A.I, Electronic & Computer Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin
Github Skills (7)
error-handling10
sdk10
elixir10
testing9
strings8
text-manipulation8
uuid7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
getsentry/sentry-elixir
Jan 2016 - Jun 2016
The official Elixir SDK for Sentry (sentry.io)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 PR in 4 months
Contributions summary:Shane primarily focused on improving the Elixir SDK for Sentry by fixing bugs and enhancing the codebase. Contributions included simplifying string patterns and fixing the UUID format to align with Sentry's expected format. The user also added test backward compatibility with older versions of Elixir and refactored the code to handle specific error messages.
sentry-iosentryelixirsdkelixir-sdk
Mainframe-Archive/onyx
Nov 2017 - Jul 2018
Decentralized messaging application based on PSS
Contributions:6 releases, 56 commits, 10 PRs in 7 months
rewarddecentralizedpssmessagingtypescript
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