Simon Whitaker
Principal Engineer at Phoebe
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Whitaker is a Principal Engineer with 16 years of experience building software and the teams that build it, currently driving engineering at Coral in the UK. He combines deep hands-on expertise across mobile, backend and developer tooling from senior roles at Facebook and Amazon to leadership at startups like Shift Lab and Synthace. Simon is an active open-source contributor — notable for practical, cross-platform tools such as gibo (gitignore boilerplates) and polished front-end utilities like the resolution-independent GitHub fork ribbon. He has a track record of refactoring and modernizing systems (e.g., APNs Python library improvements) and shipping robust shell completion and installation UX for widely used developer tools. A practical engineer-manager, he moves fluidly between code and strategy, enjoying the challenge of simplifying complex developer workflows. An early background in pharmacy and an MSc in Computing underline an uncommon blend of analytical rigor and software craftsmanship.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Pharmacy - BPharm, Pharmacy, Bachelor of Pharmacy - BPharm, Pharmacy at Cardiff University / Prifysgol CaerdyddMSc Computing, Computing, MSc Computing, Computing at Oxford Brookes University
English
Stackoverflow
20,546reputation
1.5mreached
168answers
11questions
xcode
top-5%
ios
top-1%
bash
top-5%
delegates
top-1%
iphone
top-1%
objective-c
top-1%
Github Skills (39)
apn10
git10
objective-c10
ios10
ssl10
python10
scripting10
css10
bash10
gitignore10
script10
delegates10
html10
sh10
shell10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
simonwhitaker/github-fork-ribbon-css
Oct 2013 - Dec 2021
A CSS-only, resolution-independent "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 33 commits, 21 PRs in 8 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the project by modifying the front-end aspects of the CSS ribbon. They added color variants to the demo page, improved the documentation with Bower and CDN installation instructions, and tweaked the demo page title. Furthermore, the user bumped the CSS ribbon's version and made code adjustments. These changes enhance the usability and installation process of the GitHub fork ribbon.
css-onlycssindependentresolutionfork-me
simonwhitaker/gibo
May 2014 - Sep 2022
🤫 Easy access to gitignore boilerplates
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer (Shell Scripting & Completion Scripting)
Full-stack Developer (Shell Scripting & Completion Scripting)Contributions:9 releases, 5 reviews, 82 commits in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the `gibo` project, which provides gitignore templates. Their contributions included improvements to shell completion scripts for Bash and Zsh, adding a Fish shell completion script, and refining existing ones. The user also added support for environment variables in the shell completion scripts and made various version updates to the main script file. These changes involved improving the usability and expanding the reach of the tool to different shell environments.
golanggitignoregitignore-filesgitignore-templatesgo
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