Thomas Sawyer
Open Source Developer at Self-Employed
Melbourne, Florida, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Sawyer is an experienced full‑stack software developer and open source maintainer with nearly two decades building production systems across Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and SQL. Based in Melbourne, Florida, he runs Tab Computing and has been self-employed as an open source developer since 2004, contributing notably to high‑visibility projects like Shopify’s Liquid templating engine, Tilt, and the Gollum wiki. His work spans Android app development, Ruby library and backend enhancements, and relational database design, with a pragmatic focus on TDD/BDD and secure content sanitization. Comfortable across Linux and .NET environments, he blends hands‑on coding with product thinking from system architecture to shipping examples and docs. Trained in philosophy, he brings a thoughtful, security‑minded approach to API design and developer ergonomics that shows up in both code and documentation.
18 years of coding experience
Philosophy, Philosophy at St. John's College
Stackoverflow
1,431reputation
234kreached
31answers
8questions
Github Skills (22)
wikipedia10
testing10
template-engine10
ruby10
radius10
sanitization10
liquid10
strings9
text-manipulation9
documentation9
web-development8
rdoc8
markdown-it8
markdown8
html7
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
gollum/gollum
Oct 2010 - Jul 2012
A simple, Git-powered wiki with a local frontend and support for many kinds of markup and content.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the sanitization and overall functionality of the Gollum wiki. Their work included implementing customizable sanitization options to enhance security and control over the wiki's content rendering, and they modified how sanitization is handled within the wiki. The user also added features, such as allowing deactivation of sanitization and the inclusion of embedded page metadata. Additionally, they fixed a misspelling, corrected documentation, and added functionality for listing non-page files.
simple-gitapigollumdocumentation-tooljruby-support
rtomayko/tilt
Nov 2009 - May 2010
Generic interface to multiple Ruby template engines
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Thomas contributed to the `tilt` repository by adding support for several template engines. They introduced Liquid, RDoc, HTML, and Radius template support, expanding the functionality of the project. The user implemented features such as scope handling for Liquid templates and added test cases to validate the new features. Further commits improved the Radius template implementation and addressed potential threading issues.
template-enginesgeneric-interfacerubygenericengines
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