Lawrence Akka
Barrister at Twenty Essex
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLawrence Akka is a barrister and technology-savvy legal advocate with over three decades at the Bar and 12 years of focused IT practice advising insurers, banks, businesses and individuals in complex national and international disputes. He combines a First Class law degree from Oxford with deep hands-on technical experience—having developed domestic and business software, administered networks, and written in languages from C++ to Python. His legal practice spans software and hardware procurement, outsourcing, data protection and e‑commerce, as well as shipping, commodities, insurance and arbitration. He brings a rare ability to translate technical issues into persuasive legal strategy, evidenced by contributions to notable open-source Python projects like SoCo and improvements to Vim’s python-mode debugging and error handling. A seasoned arbitrator and lecturer, he is active in the British Computer Society and the Society for Computers and Law. Clients benefit from his blend of litigation experience, technical fluency and practical software development insight.
13 years of coding experience
BA (Hons) First Class, Law, BA (Hons) First Class, Law at University of Oxford
French
Github Skills (12)
vimscript10
xml10
debugging10
unit-testing10
error-handling10
python10
soap10
networking9
communications9
data-communication9
network9
net9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
SoCo/SoCo
Dec 2013 - Nov 2016
SoCo (Sonos Controller) is a Python project that allows you to programmatically control Sonos speakers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:381 commits, 47 PRs, 81 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:Lawrence contributed significantly to the SoCo (Sonos Controller) project by implementing core functionality for interacting with Sonos devices. They introduced new code for generating XML commands dynamically, refactoring parts of the core module. The user also added and modified several service classes within the `soco/services.py` module, including adding new methods to the code. Finally, the user created and integrated unit tests for the `services` module to maintain software quality.
pythonsonos
python-mode/python-mode
Aug 2013 - Sep 2013
Vim python-mode. PyLint, Rope, Pydoc, breakpoints from box.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits in 28 days
Contributions summary:Lawrence primarily focused on improving the error handling and debugging capabilities of the Vim Python mode. They implemented a mechanism to handle `SystemExit` exceptions raised by Python scripts, ensuring proper termination behavior within Vim. Their work also involved refining the quickfix window output by adjusting the error format and adding traceback information for enhanced clarity and usability. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to error line numbers when running a range of lines.
pydocpylintpython-modevim
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