Dane Powell
Principal Software Engineer at Acquia
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDane Powell is a Principal Software Engineer based in San Francisco with 14+ years building and architecting large-scale Drupal systems, from single decoupled sites to multi-thousand-tenant platforms for finance. He blends hands-on backend and DevOps expertise—contributing and maintaining enterprise tooling like Acquia BLT and improving projects such as Composer, Drush, and PHPMD—with leadership roles that have managed international delivery teams and shaped best practices. A prolific open-source maintainer (1000+ patches/PRs) and former NASA Space Technology Research Fellow, he brings uncommon depth in automation, configuration management, and CI/CD alongside a background in haptics and robotics. Dane also develops cross-ecosystem projects—Alexa Skills, Android apps, Node.js/Mongo backends—and has responsibly disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities, highlighting a practical security mindset. Outside work he’s an outdoor enthusiast and rock climber, reflecting the same methodical problem-solving he applies to engineering challenges.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, B.S., Mechanical Engineering at Rice UniversityMechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at The University of British ColumbiaMechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at Queen Mary, U. of London
English
Stackoverflow
631reputation
102kreached
11answers
8questions
Github Skills (29)
dependency-manager10
cli10
git10
drupal10
static-analysis10
package-management10
testing10
configuration-management10
bash10
autoload10
cicd10
phpunit10
php10
drush10
devops10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
acquia/blt
May 2016 - Jan 2023
Acquia's toolset for automating Drupal 8 and 9 development, testing, and deployment.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:61 releases, 18 reviews, 1063 commits in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dane's contributions focused on improving the deployment process and automation within the Acquia BLT toolset for Drupal. They made changes to various scripts and configuration files, including cloud hook scripts for deployment, updates, and database operations, to support the build process and streamline the deployment of Drupal applications. Their work involved setting up, and configuring, CI/CD pipelines to simulate deploys during the Travis CI execution. In addition, they updated dependencies, fixed issues related to configuration management and updated the BLT template.
continuous-testingwaitdeploymenttestingdrupal
cweagans/composer-patches
Nov 2017 - Dec 2022
Simple patches plugin for Composer
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 release, 3 reviews, 10 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Dane primarily contributed to improving the project's stability and maintainability. They addressed compatibility issues with newer Git versions and updated dependencies to support modern PHP and Composer environments. They also added and fixed automated tests, including addressing PHP 8.2 compatibility and ensuring the tests function correctly with Composer 2, demonstrating an emphasis on code quality and continuous integration.
patchphpnamespacepackagistpatches
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