Tom Forbes is a Staff Engineer based in London with 14 years of experience building backend systems and developer tooling, currently shaping security-focused engineering at GitGuardian. He is a Django specialist who contributes to core projects like django and django-mptt and has improved performance and correctness across libraries such as s3fs, lxml, and the RustPython interpreter. Tom’s work spans designing microservices, enhancing Python testing and benchmarking suites, and hardening filesystem and database interactions for production use. He has held senior engineering roles at Onfido and Kraken Technologies and helped scale platform capabilities at Marvel and Context Information Security. Beyond day-to-day engineering, he started a major Python meetup in Lisbon and brings a practical blend of open-source craftsmanship and large-scale product experience. Colleagues know him for digging into core library internals to fix subtle bugs and squeeze out measurable performance gains.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science, Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science at University of Hull
Contributions:2 reviews, 298 commits, 159 PRs in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily worked on the core functionality of `gping`, a command-line tool for pinging with a graph. Their commits involved restructuring the project's code, modifying the `setup.py` file for version management and dependencies, and updating the `readme.md` file. The user also addressed bugs and added features. Key changes include integrating colorama and addressing keyboard interrupt handling.
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:59 reviews, 1 commit, 101 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the Django framework's back-end functionality, focusing on bug fixes and feature enhancements. Their work included adding distinct arguments to array aggregates, modifying forms related to PostgreSQL, and preventing query join inefficiencies. Furthermore, they implemented changes related to redirect handling, improved performance of existing utilities, and added support for the bulk update operations. These commits demonstrate expertise in core Django features and improving the framework's efficiency and capabilities.
pythondjango-frameworkappsdjangoframework
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