Tim Mcnamara
Founder at Accelerant
Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTim Mcnamara is a founder and seasoned software engineer with 16 years of experience building energy-efficient, reliable systems and helping teams adopt Rust. Based in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, he has driven backend work at organizations from AWS and Canonical to data-intensive platforms like Dragonfly, and now leads Accelerant to promote safe, efficient software practices. An active open-source contributor, Tim has improved core projects such as the Rust in Action codebase, the ChicagoBoss Erlang framework, and the slate PDF text-extraction library, demonstrating a focus on correctness, documentation, and maintainability. His background spans data science, high-throughput pipelines, and disaster-management systems through long-term involvement with Sahana and the New Zealand Open Source Society. He pairs a Master of Public Policy and philosophy training with deep engineering chops, bringing both community-minded leadership and pragmatic technical problem-solving to complex, cross-disciplinary projects. Unusually, he blends public-sector emergency response experience with hands-on systems engineering, making him adept at building tools that matter under real-world constraints.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Public Policy (MPP), Master of Public Policy (MPP) at Victoria University of Wellington
German
Stackoverflow
18,159reputation
5.5mreached
172answers
37questions
substring
top-5%
scrapy
top-5%
documentation
top-1%
dictionary
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testing
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unit-testing
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Github Skills (43)
algorithm10
application-framework10
algorithms10
erlang10
python10
api-design10
testing10
nltk10
app-framework10
data-structure10
pdf-processing10
dictionary10
text-extraction10
data-structures10
web-framework10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
timClicks/slate
Nov 2010 - Apr 2017
The simplest way to extract text from PDFs in Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:34 commits, 6 PRs, 10 pushes in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `slate` library, focusing on extracting text from PDF files. Their work included implementing features for metadata extraction and cleaning up text, as well as integrating password protection. They also made improvements to the code, fixed source file issues, and refactored the project to use `distribute` and updated dependencies.
extractionpythonpdfextract-textsimplest
rust-in-action/code
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Source code for the book Rust in Action
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 13 PRs, 23 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to bug fixes and enhancements within the Rust codebase. They addressed issues related to incorrect calculations, removed references to unknown variables, and corrected range specifications. Furthermore, the user added new examples and corrected implementation issues, showcasing a focus on code quality and accuracy within the project.
rust-in-actionrustrustlangmanning-publicationsrust-book
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