Tim Dawborn
Principal Engineer at Airtasker
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTim Dawborn is a Principal Engineer with 15 years of experience building secure, scalable edtech platforms and cloud infrastructure from Sydney. He co-founded Grok Learning, led its architecture and identity integrations (SAML2/OAuth2/SCIM/LTI), and ran compliance work for education departments including IRAP and privacy assessments. At Airtasker he now drives engineering strategy while remaining hands-on across full stack, Linux sandboxing, and systems reliability. A PhD in Computational Linguistics underpins his work on performant systems and tooling, evidenced by contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Emscripten and UltraJSON where he improved performance and fixed memory issues. He combines deep research grounding with practical engineering—equally comfortable debugging cross-browser UI quirks as writing C-level bindings and production sandboxes.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Northholm Grammar SchoolThe University of Sydney
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (30)
unit-testing10
json10
caching10
javascript10
c-language10
python10
django10
encoder10
css10
c1110
decode10
c1710
lua10
front-end-development10
html10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
django-cache-machine/django-cache-machine
Nov 2013 - Feb 2016
Automatic caching and invalidation for Django models through the ORM.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 10 comments in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily focused on porting the `django-cache-machine` project to support Django 1.6 and later versions, addressing changes in the caching API. They added a new constant, DEFAULT_TIMEOUT, to maintain compatibility. The commits included changes to the caching logic, documentation updates, and unit tests. The user also corrected an incorrect default value in `caching/base.py` and converted assert statements to the unittest framework.
pythondjangocachinginvalidationdjango-models
ultrajson/ultrajson
Feb 2015 - Dec 2018
Ultra fast JSON decoder and encoder written in C with Python bindings
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 3 PRs, 7 comments in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily focused on enhancing the JSON encoding capabilities of the `ultrajson` library. Their contributions include adding the `sort_keys` parameter to enable sorted dictionary iteration during JSON encoding, which involved changes to C code and Python bindings. Additionally, the user fixed a memory leak and made improvements to the testing and benchmarking infrastructure. This work demonstrates a focus on improving the library's performance and functionality.
ultrajsonjson-decoderpythonpython-bindingsdecoder
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