Simon Holywell
Senior Full Stack Engineer (Courtroom Team) at For The Record (FTR)
Brisbane City, Queensland, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Holywell is a Senior Full Stack Engineer with 16 years' experience building resilient web and desktop systems, currently improving courtroom audio and streaming experiences using TypeScript, Rust and cloud infrastructure. A former technical director and team lead, he combines hands-on engineering with process-led quality improvements—authoring a book on functional PHP and holding Zend PHP certification. He has a strong open-source footprint, contributing notable enhancements to the idiorm ORM and macOS Nix configuration, reflecting a mix of backend, DevOps and front-end skills. Simon has repeatedly delivered high-availability media ingestion and realtime streaming solutions at scale, plus packaged desktop installers and cross-platform tooling. Colocated in Brisbane, he’s as comfortable mentoring teams and training clients as he is refactoring ORMs and automating system configuration.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bch Multimedia Systems (Applications), Bch Multimedia Systems (Applications) at Monash University
English, German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
21,475reputation
2.5mreached
444answers
38questions
mysql
top-5%
sql
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javascript
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jquery-selectors
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foreach
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jquery
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Github Skills (42)
styles10
javascript10
styleguidist10
object-mapping10
nix10
css10
htaccess10
abstraction10
dotfile10
query-building10
darwin10
php10
orm10
sql10
html10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
j4mie/idiorm
Nov 2012 - Jul 2022
A lightweight nearly-zero-configuration object-relational mapper and fluent query builder for PHP5.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 1 review, 237 commits in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily worked on improving and extending the core functionality of the Idiorm library. They implemented features such as aggregate functions, the `having` clause, and methods for handling expressions and raw queries, which enhanced the query building capabilities. Significant changes also included adding the `select_many` and `select_many_expr` methods to the ORM and improving the internal workings of the code by addressing issues related to the `is_dirty` and `is_new` methods. These contributions focused on strengthening Idiorm's capabilities as an ORM, adding support for more complex SQL queries and improving its flexibility.
queryrelationalzerophp5php
j4mie/paris
Nov 2012 - Jul 2022
A lightweight Active Record implementation for PHP5, built on top of Idiorm.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 114 commits, 10 PRs in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the core functionality of the lightweight Active Record implementation. Their work focused on supporting namespaces within the `_class_name_to_table_name` method. They added the `set_expr` method and the `is_new` method to the Paris class, further expanding its feature set. They were also involved in refactoring and merging code from development branches.
php5railsphprubyactive-record
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