Alec Smecher
Associate Director Of Development
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
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RockstarAlec Smecher is an experienced software leader with 16 years building and maintaining robust back-end systems, currently serving as Associate Director of Development at the Public Knowledge Project in Vancouver. He specializes in PHP-based open source platforms for scholarly publishing and localization, notably contributing backend integrations and payment systems to the widely used Open Journal Systems (pkp/ojs). Alec has improved internationalization tooling by adding XLIFF unit ID support and refactoring generators in the php-gettext project, demonstrating attention to interoperability and developer ergonomics. Known for pragmatic cleanups and careful error prevention, he blends hands-on coding with product-minded stewardship of community software. Colleagues would note his sense of measured chaos—Optimonium—bringing just enough pandemonium to solve thorny engineering and integration challenges.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (10)
php10
internationalization10
xliff10
gettext10
back-end-development10
translation10
testing9
regular-expression9
postgresql8
javascript7
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
pkp/ojs
Feb 2010 - Jan 2023
Open Journal Systems is open source software to manage scholarly journals.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:311 reviews, 7721 commits, 1837 PRs in 13 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Alec made several contributions to the project, including code changes to correct geographical nomenclature for countries and languages, implement a payment system, and various clean-up tasks. They modified the handling of payment types, user subscriptions, and the structure of grid components. Additionally, they updated several PHP files for improved performance and error prevention. This developer focused on the integration of payment systems and improved the backend functionality of the journal management software.
journalopen-access
php-gettext/Gettext
Aug 2019 - Sep 2019
PHP library to collect and manipulate gettext (.po, .mo, .php, .json, etc)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 2 PRs, 20 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Alec focused on enhancing the `php-gettext/gettext` library, specifically adding support for XLIFF unit IDs. Their contributions involved modifying code across multiple files, including generators and extractors, to incorporate unit ID handling and integration with comments. Furthermore, they refactored the code for better modularity, added new tests, and updated the logic for unit ID generation and retrieval. This resulted in improved compatibility with XLIFF files and a better developer experience.
gettextphp-libraryinternationalizationi18ntranslation
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