Despo Pentara Gale
I’m a senior software engineer and technical lead with nearly two decades of experience, including 15 years building and running production Ruby on Rails systems end to end.
About
I’m a senior software engineer and technical lead with nearly two decades of experience, including 15 years building and running production Ruby on Rails systems end to end. I take ownership from discovery and architecture through to delivery and production support, with a strong track record in multi-tenant SaaS design, data modelling, APIs, payments, and the practical work of stabilising and upgrading legacy codebases with safe refactors.
I’ve delivered major public-sector and product features, from building core capabilities for national education services to extending vendor-facing APIs with versioning and staged rollouts. I also build and maintain internal operations tooling—dashboards, exports, and back-office correction flows—to help teams support users effectively. I’m a co-founder of Shift42 and also the founder of codebar, a charity that promotes diversity in tech through free weekly coding workshops.
- 19 years' experience
- Joined October 2026
Industry experience
- Education
- Government
- Non-Profit Organization
- Software & Internet
- Professional Services
Work experience· 18 roles
Co-founded the studio and owned its technical direction across client projects. Led architecture and technology decisions, ran requirements gathering and analysis, and translated business goals into delivered software. Wrote proposals and statements of work, and advised on product and technical approach for a client booking, payments and loyalty platform from inception to launch. Built on Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Hotwire, and Stripe Connect.
Created and maintained a customer-facing Rails backend and API integrations, and led work on Wrangler: refactoring/optimisation plus feature development. Established full test coverage via characterisation tests and published a Heroku add-on.
Developed backend APIs, a customer-facing Rails application, and an in-house candidate management system for a tech recruitment platform. Later led development of Wrangler, a database analytics product, combining feature delivery with refactoring and performance optimisation; increased test coverage using characterisation tests and published a Heroku add-on.
Education· 6
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