Alex Chan
Software Engineer
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Chan is a software engineer and tech lead with 12 years’ experience building long-lived, reliable systems for telecoms and digital preservation, most recently leading efforts at the Flickr Foundation to keep images accessible for a century. He combines backend engineering, QA/test automation, and documentation craftsmanship—contributing to well-known open-source projects like requests, urllib3, h2, and Hypothesis by modernizing tests, improving RFC compliance, and sharpening docs. A Cambridge mathematics graduate, Alex has steered teams at Wellcome Trust and Metaswitch while also shaping DevOps practices such as Terraform linting and robust testing frameworks. He writes regularly about his work and interests, blending technical rigor with a curator’s mindset for maintainability and inclusivity. An infrequent dancer and hand crafter, he brings a thoughtful, long-term perspective to software that must keep working for decades.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
5,873reputation
242kreached
56answers
8questions
rust
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
property-based-testing10
git10
ssl10
restructuredtext10
pytest10
python10
django10
testing10
http10
rs10
terraform10
terraformer10
go10
openssl10
cryptography10
Programming languages (32)
Github contributions (5)
python-hyper/h2
Oct 2015 - Sep 2019
Pure-Python HTTP/2 protocol implementation
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:76 commits, 147 PRs, 183 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `h2` library, implementing features related to HTTP/2 protocol compliance. They fixed bugs in the documentation, settings, and examples, including addressing typos and removing redundant code. Furthermore, the user added new validation to outbound and inbound headers to enforce RFC 7540.
python
urllib3/urllib3
Nov 2016 - Sep 2019
urllib3 is a user-friendly HTTP client library for Python
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:15 reviews, 35 commits, 39 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex's commits primarily focused on improving the test suite for the `urllib3` library. They replaced the testing framework from `nose` to `pytest`, demonstrating a move to a more modern testing approach. The user also added cleanup code to the dummy server tests, reducing warnings and improving test stability. Additionally, the user addressed warning messages related to SNI and refactored test files to align with the `pytest` style.
http-clientpythonurlliburllib3
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