Richard North’s Blog

About Me #

Richard North

I’m a prin­ci­pal en­gi­neer based in London, fo­cused on de­vel­oper ex­pe­ri­ence, soft­ware test­ing, and the plat­forms and tools en­gi­neers use every day.

I cre­ated Testcontainers in 2015 — a Docker-based li­brary for run­ning real de­pen­den­cies in­side au­to­mated tests. It’s grown into a de-facto ap­proach to in­te­gra­tion test­ing across Java, .NET, Go, Node, Python and more, used at com­pa­nies in­clud­ing Uber, Netflix, Spotify and Google. In 2021 I co-founded AtomicJar to build a com­mer­cial com­ple­ment to it, Testcontainers Cloud; AtomicJar was ac­quired by Docker in 2023. I’m no longer in­volved in the pro­ject, but I’m proud of what it be­came.

Today I’m a prin­ci­pal en­gi­neer at Skyscanner, work­ing on de­vel­oper en­able­ment, in­ter­nal tool­ing and pro­duc­tion plat­forms — in­clud­ing Turbolift, a tool for mak­ing code changes across a large mi­croser­vice es­tate (the story be­hind it). Lately I’ve been fo­cused on mak­ing AI agents gen­uinely use­ful in­side large, real-world code­bases.

A thread runs through most of what I build: prag­matic tools that pay at­ten­tion to what en­gi­neers ac­tu­ally need and get the job done.

Outside work I’m a fa­ther of two, a hus­band, and a gen­eral-pur­pose geek — in­ter­ested in home au­toma­tion, elec­tron­ics, and a long tail of other things. A few of those have es­caped onto the in­ter­net: eu­ston.wtf, for catch­ing trains from Euston a lit­tle more eas­ily; week­ends, a print­able cal­en­dar gen­er­a­tor built around week­ends and pub­lic hol­i­days; and bikegears, a gear cal­cu­la­tor for youth bike rac­ing.

Contact #

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn or email. My code is on GitHub.

I write here from time to time — the archive goes back a fair way.

Latest Posts

Using Tailscale with Docker
Faster builds with highly par­al­lel GitHub Actions
More prac­ti­cal direnv

More posts can be found in the archive.