Tim Macdonald
Software Engineer at Laravel
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
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RockstarTim Macdonald is a seasoned software engineer based in Melbourne with nine years of experience building high-performance, test-driven web applications, primarily in PHP and Laravel. As a core Laravel team member and current Software Engineer at Laravel, he contributes to foundational framework components (illuminate/*) and developer tools like Jetstream, Breeze and the Vite plugin, improving ORM features, build tooling and DX. He blends back-end depth—adding Eloquent/query features, validation and caching—with practical front-end work on Tailwind-based scaffolding and UI refinements. Previously he led backend chapters and teams at Big Picture and shipped product-focused systems at startups like Tixel, while earlier work included language revitalisation tools for Indigenous communities. Known for building and publishing reusable packages, speaking and blogging, he brings a developer-first perspective that values maintainability, tooling and developer experience.
9 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
English, pirate, binary, jargon
Github Skills (60)
database-migrations10
application-framework10
caching10
javascript10
subscribe10
query-builder10
validations10
apidoc10
laravel-mix10
testing10
plugin-development10
css10
app-framework10
sass10
vite10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
laravel/vite-plugin
May 2022 - Dec 2022
Laravel plugin for Vite.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 51 reviews, 64 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the `laravel/vite-plugin` repository, a plugin for Laravel. Their work focused on enhancing the plugin's functionality, including supporting full-page reloads for blade files and arbitrary file changes. They made changes to the core index file, updated test files, and also fixed issues related to SSR and inertia helpers. The user also addressed code formatting and dependency updates.
laravelvitelaravel-plugin
calcinai/xero-php
Jul 2017 - Aug 2019
A php library for the Xero API, with a cleaner OAuth interface and ORM-like abstraction.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:93 commits, 84 PRs, 152 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tim contributed to a PHP library for the Xero API. Their work focused on implementing new features, such as retrieving online invoice URLs, and refining existing code. They also addressed code quality by fixing comment spacing, spelling, and updating string values to refer to constants, which improved code maintainability. Additionally, the user added tests and refactored exception handling within the library.
apiphpxerooauth2php-library
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