Luke Plant
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
With a background in various programming languages—in both open source and commercial environments—Luke became a Django core developer in 2006. Since then, he has worked as a freelance developer, primarily using Python/Django with a full-stack experience but focusing on server-side technologies. His biggest project to date has been leading the development of a rapidly growing eCommerce platform, including scaling both the team and technologies.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Emacs, Git, Mercurial, Linux
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is the web framework Django. It's very rewarding to contribute components and features that are now used worldwide.
Work Experience
Freelance Web Developer | Formerly Team Leader
Wolf & Badger
- Took on a functioning but struggling project and turned it around into an award-winning eCommerce web site, with the business continuing to grow 2-3 times year on year.
- Utilized my expertise in Python and Django to fix major performance problems on key pages.
- Implemented various designer-supplied graphical designs in HTML/CSS—adapting them to add responsive features.
- Worked with client to identify business needs, while utilizing knowledge of web trends, to both drive the business forward and enable subsequent large refactorings and cleanups.
- Scaled the development team up from being the sole member to a distributed team; including doing recruiting and online technical interviews, and introducing code review and other quality controls.
- Continued to implement large scale changes to the codebase to cope with new business needs - for example, converting the project to be multi-currency.
- Developed and released the testing library "Django-Functest" to aid testing requirements.
Freelance Web Developer
Cardiff University School of Medicine
- Extensively customized an existing JavaScript editor for the department's CMS application.
- Participated in the design of a UI that emphasized semantic editing and designer-defined styling in order to make consistent styling across the site possible.
- Integrated into the editor a layout system that allowed users to create multicolumn layouts without the need for special templates or editing HTML.
- Implemented all of the above as a plugin to a Django CMS that was released as an independent open source project.
Software Developer
Diagonal Solutions
- Implemented bespoke, web-based business applications for government bodies—police departments and local councils—using C# and ASP.NET.
- Used and extended the company's in-house enterprise CMS solution.
- Delivered websites to exacting accessibility standards for public sector bodies.
- Used test-driven development to produce software of the highest quality.
Freelance Developer
Federal Mogul
- Developed bespoke software for internal order processing.
- Performed business analysis of their existing ordering processes in order to provide equivalent software solutions, streamlined where possible.
- Worked within software constraints of a multinational company to provide accessible software.
- Provided end-to-end support for a new system from design to installation.
- Iterated a software solution rapidly in response to user needs and further business process clarifications.
Experience
Django
https://www.djangoproject.com/I joined the team as a core developer in 2006, and I've worked on a range of components—including contributing to the CSRF protection and parts of the template parser and many smaller features and fixes, often security related.
Django-Functest
https://github.com/django-functest/django-functest/I wrote the library, extracting it from several projects that needed the functionality, and am currently maintaining it.
Christian Camps in Wales
https://www.cciw.co.uk/Due to handling sensitive information, it has to be done to the highest standards, with carefully implemented permissions that cope with continual roll-over of staff.
This project benefits greatly from its use of Django and has extensive functional and unit testing. I have also used charting and visualizations to highlight problems and progress with regard to compliance with the charity's own regulations.
All source code is released under an open source license.
Learn Scripture
https://learnscripture.net/From the beginning, it was designed to work well on mobile devices in terms of being responsive to screen size, touch screens, and bandwidth constraints.
To support some of the testing methods that users choose, it uses Markov chains for textual analysis to generate candidate word choices.
Implemented using Django, Celery, PostgreSQL, and jQuery.
Django-PayPal
https://github.com/spookylukey/django-paypal/Skills
Frameworks
Django, ASP.NET, Selenium, Django REST Framework
Libraries/APIs
Django ORM, jQuery, Fabric, SQLAlchemy
Other
Freelancing, WYMeditor, Gunicorn, Integration Testing
Languages
Less, HTML, Python, C#, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), CSS, SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript
Tools
Emacs, Git, Microsoft Excel, Sentry, Celery, NGINX, uWSGI, GitHub, Mercurial
Paradigms
Functional Testing, Unit Testing, Test-driven Development (TDD), Functional Programming
Platforms
Linux, Django CMS, New Relic, Mailgun
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite
Education
Master of Science in Natural Sciences
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, UK
Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Natural Sciences
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, UK
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