Dan Phiffer
Senior Engineer For Web And Publishing Products at ProPublica
City of Troy, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDan Phiffer is a seasoned full-stack engineer with 17 years building and migrating web and publishing platforms for newsrooms, cultural institutions, and civic organizations, now leading web and publishing product engineering at ProPublica. He combines front- and back-end expertise—especially WordPress integrations and APIs—with an eye for maintainable, well-documented systems and thoughtful interaction design. His open-source work includes substantive contributions to a WordPress JSON API implementation, focusing on robust error handling, security (nonce validation), and flexible HTTP status and query filtering. Having relaunched major sites like The New Yorker and supported platform migrations at MoMA and Mapzen, he’s comfortable with high-stakes editorial workflows and data-driven tooling. Based in Troy, NY, he blends practical systems administration experience with a designer’s attention to detail from an NYU ITP and Harvey Mudd CS background.
17 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Master's degree, Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York UniversityBachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College
Stackoverflow
43reputation
5kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (17)
json10
api-rest10
api-design10
restful-api10
wordpress10
php10
error-handling10
rest-api10
http-status-code8
filterlist7
filter7
filtering7
flexbox6
shared-libraries6
css6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
dphiffer/wp-json-api
Mar 2011 - Aug 2015
WordPress JSON API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 10 pushes, 8 tags in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily contributed to the core functionality of the WordPress JSON API, focusing on error handling, and implementing features related to creating, updating, and deleting posts. They addressed security concerns by incorporating nonce validation and HTTP status codes. The commits also involved integrating filters for query arguments and HTTP status, enhancing the API's flexibility and control over its responses. Several changes were made to the Services_JSON.php file, which indicates that this developer focused on the internals of JSON encoding/decoding processes.
wordpressapijson-apijson
dphiffer/neighbor.group
Mar 2020 - Mar 2025
Local group collaboration
Contributions:15 PRs, 31 pushes, 17 branches in 5 years
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