Hugh Gallagher

Who am I?

I'm a full-stack software engineer based in Milton Keynes with over 20 years of experience building for the web. My daily work revolves around Ruby on Rails and Stimulus.js, where I care deeply about writing clean, maintainable code, solid test suites, and sensible API integrations. I bring a collaborative mindset, a genuine curiosity for learning new tools, and I actively use AI-assisted coding tools to help me explore solutions, refactor faster, and get things done. At the end of the day, I just love solving practical problems and building software that people enjoy using.

Things I do

Backend

Ruby on Rails Ruby PostgreSQL Apache Solr REST APIs ETL Pipelines Third-Party Integrations

Frontend

Stimulus.js Hotwire (Turbo) JavaScript (ES6+) HTML5 CSS3 esbuild Yarn

AI & Automation

AI-Assisted Workflows Prompt Engineering RSpec Jest CI/CD Pipelines Code Reviews APM & Telemetry

Infrastructure

Docker AWS Linux CLI Bash Git Agile Remote Collaboration

Places I've worked

Keyloop

Senior Software Engineer

Oct 2024 – Present

Continued development and integration of the Vehicle Hub platform (formerly SalesMaster) following Keyloop's acquisition of ATG, working within distributed remote Agile teams.
Led a zero-downtime search infrastructure migration, upgrading Apache Solr from version 4 to 10 across millions of documents, significantly improving query latency, index performance, and schema reliability.
Architected and delivered the redevelopment of a sales event and activity timeline product, leveraging modern Rails tooling (Turbo and Stimulus.js) and modern CSS frameworks.
Proactively monitored application performance (APM) and production telemetry to triage issues, optimise database bottlenecks, and reduce error rates.
Integrating Vehicle Hub APIs with Keyloop's wider automotive retail ecosystem.

Automotive Transformation Group

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 2022 – Oct 2024

Delivered the technical rebranding and platform transition of the core automotive product from SalesMaster to Vehicle Hub following the acquisition.
Built omnichannel sales integrations connecting Vehicle Hub with wider group services and third-party platforms.
Modernised the JavaScript toolchain by migrating to esbuild and Yarn, introducing Jest test coverage.
Championed code quality and engineering standards through thorough code reviews, architectural discussions, and automated CI pipelines.

SalesMaster

Senior Product Developer

Nov 2013 – May 2022

Full-stack development of the company's core automotive sales and inventory platform using Ruby on Rails.
Maintained and enhanced the in-house ETL system for processing large-scale vehicle data feeds.
Integrated various third-party automotive APIs, manufacturer data feeds, and DMS systems.
Mentored junior developers in Ruby on Rails best practices, clean code design, and Git branching workflows.

IMS Evolve

Web Applications Developer

June 2010 – Nov 2013

Developed web-based machine management systems and backend APIs in Perl (Catalyst, CGI, mod_perl) with Sencha ExtJS frontends.
Improved engineering standards by migrating version control from SVN to Git, introducing branching workflows, automated testing, and code documentation.
Maintained third-party integration projects using DBIx::Class and Moose.

Redeye International

Web Applications Developer

Nov 2004 – June 2010

Developed and supported high-volume email marketing and analytics platforms using Perl and PostgreSQL (sending over 2M emails daily at peak).
Contributed to the design and implementation of an analytics web application with ExtJS and PHP.
Assisted with server migrations and configuration automation for infrastructure moves.

Stockton Borough Carers Resource Centre

Web Designer

Sep 2003 – Apr 2004

Designed and developed a community content management system with PHP and MySQL as part of a final-year university partnership project.