Bruce Wells is a retired senior software engineer with nearly 30 years of hands-on experience building and repeatedly rewriting core systems that scaled a company from dozens to thousands of clients. He excels across the stack—system architecture, OO development in C/C++, PHP, responsive web design, build automation and production support—and has a long track record of turning user needs into robust, maintainable products. At Radio Computing Services he led development that powered company growth, and more recently contributed to PHP open-source projects (including improvements to the widely used rector tool and a PHP html-to-text library), demonstrating a focus on code quality and modernization. Based in Scarsdale, NY, he brings a pragmatic, team-oriented approach and a knack for solving tricky encoding, testing and backward-compatibility challenges that many engineers overlook.
11 years of coding experience
38 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Communications, Computer Science, BS, Communications, Computer Science at Ithaca College
A PHP component to convert HTML into a plain text format
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & QA Engineer
Contributions:14 commits, 2 PRs, 3 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Bruce focused on improving the quality and maintainability of the PHP-based HTML to text conversion library. Their work included modernizing the PHPUnit tests with data providers, creating a dedicated directory for test failures, and adding specific tests for character set handling. They also addressed Windows-1252 encoding issues and updated the code to align with PHP 7.0, and PHP 8.2.
Instant Upgrades and Automated Refactoring of any PHP 5.3+ code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 commits, 7 PRs, 42 comments in 5 days
Contributions summary:Bruce primarily contributed to the `rectorphp/rector` repository by refactoring and improving the codebase related to PHP parsing and code transformation. Their commits addressed potential issues by preventing negative values for the indent level in the BetterStandardPrinter. They also removed an `include` rector and added a `AddTopIncludeRector` functionality to add an include file at the top of matching files. This work indicates a focus on enhancing code quality and adding new features to the Rector tool.
instant-upgradesphp-5automated-upgradesphpast
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