The Boring Stuff

Work

I'm a Senior Software Engineer at GoCardless.

I used to work on the nitty-gritty of how money flows through our systems, and led an interesting project to make it possible to localise our daily payouts process for different currencies, to take better advantage of local scheme timings and get money to our merchants faster. Early in 2024 I changed teams into a more merchant-facing role, working on new features and functionality that are more directly visible to the end-users.

Before GoCardless, I worked at GOV.UK, doing a variety of things.

I like working on tricky technical challenges, and gravitate to infrastructure or backend. As you can see from this website, I'm not very good at frontend.

See my CV for a bullet-point highlight reel.

Research

I did a Ph.D at the University of York on the topic of testing concurrent Haskell programs. I ultimately decided that academia wasn't for me, but I'm glad I stuck it out to the end.

Here's a PDF of my thesis.

I published a couple of papers too:

If you want to cite any of those, use this BibTeX: 

@PhdThesis{walker2018,
  author = "Walker, Michael",
  title  = "Revealing Behaviours of Concurrent Functional Programs by Systematic Testing",
  year   = 2018,
}
My Ph.D thesis.
@InProceedings{dejafu-hs15,
  author    = "Walker, Michael and Runciman, Colin",
  title     = {{D{'e}j\`{a} Fu}: {A} Concurrency Testing Library for {Haskell}},
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell",
  series    = "Haskell 2015",
  year      = "2015",
  isbn      = "978-1-4503-3808-0",
  location  = "Vancouver, BC, Canada",
  pages     = "141--152",
  numpages  = "12",
  url       = "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2804302.2804306",
  doi       = "10.1145/2804302.2804306",
  acmid     = "2804306",
  publisher = "ACM",
  address   = "New York, NY, USA",
}
"Déjà Fu: A Concurrency Testing Library for Haskell".
@InProceedings{coco-flops18,
  author    = "Walker, Michael and Runciman, Colin",
  title     = "Cheap Remarks About Concurrent Programs",
  booktitle = "Functional and Logic Programming",
  year      = 2018,
  editor    = "Gallagher, John P. and Sulzmann, Martin",
  series    = "FLOPS 2018",
  pages     = "264-279",
  publisher = "Springer International Publishing",
  isbn      = "978-3-319-90686-7",
  location  = "Nagoya, Japan",
  url       = "https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_17",
  doi       = "10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_17",
}
"Cheap Remarks About Concurrent Programs".