Brett Vickers is a Senior Software Development Engineer based in New York with 12 years of experience building and hardening backend systems at scale. Currently at BNY Mellon, he blends production-grade engineering with strong test automation and cross-platform build expertise, demonstrated by meaningful contributions to widely used open-source projects like the etree XML library and the GENie build tool. He has a Master of Computer Science from the University of Waikato and a pragmatic focus on simplifying APIs, improving error messaging, and making tooling more reliable across platforms. Known on GitHub as a practical "code hacker," he often tackles subtle bugs, namespace handling, and build-system nuances that improve developer workflows and long-term maintainability.
12 years of coding experience
Master of Computer Science, Computer Science, Master of Computer Science, Computer Science at The University of Waikato
Contributions:12 releases, 8 reviews, 72 commits in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Brett focused on improving the `etree` library's test suite and the overall quality of error messages. They addressed bugs in the testing framework, and added namespace support to attribute queries. The user also implemented a significant API simplification by deprecating "Full" APIs and enabling tag and key prefixes for namespaces. Additionally, the user has refactored the indentation within the XML elements.
Contributions:10 commits, 15 PRs, 7 comments in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Brett primarily focused on modifying the build process and underlying code generation logic of the project. Key contributions include fixing a bug in group name handling, adding a more precise tick counter for benchmarking, and refactoring the code to use the C++17 standard on specific platforms. They also made adjustments to the build files for different operating systems, which indicates a good understanding of cross-platform development. Additionally, the user updated dependencies and made changes to support the Ninja build system on Windows.
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Brett Vickers - Senior Software Development Engineer at BNY Mellon