Derek Herman
Fractional CTO Principal Engineer at Stealth
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Herman is a hands-on CTO with ~15 years of professional experience and two decades of engineering practice building cloud-native platforms, scaling distributed teams, and turning technical complexity into business results. He has led dramatic growth and operational transformation at agencies like XWP—scaling headcount 6.5x and revenue 650%—and guided startups as a fractional CTO to ship serverless, event-driven systems and investor-ready roadmaps. Equally comfortable writing production code or setting high-level architecture, he brings deep GCP/AWS expertise, API and infrastructure automation chops, and a long history in WordPress engineering and open-source contributions (notably work on OptionTree and the WordPress AMP and Two-Factor projects). Pragmatic and people-first, he emphasizes bottom-up empowerment, mentorship, and sustainable velocity while aligning engineering with product and P&L outcomes. Based in Portland, Derek pairs practical delivery skills—CI/CD, testing, performance engineering—with strategic leadership in AI, SaaS, and observability platforms.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Oregon Institute of TechnologyAssociate of Science - A.S. Computer Programming, Associate of Science - A.S. Computer Programming at Portland Community College
Stackoverflow
166reputation
4kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
docker10
ampl10
wordpress10
jshint10
bash10
travis-ci10
google-amp10
dockers10
cicd10
phpunit10
automation10
php10
automations10
php-codesniffer10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
valendesigns/option-tree
May 2011 - May 2019
Theme Options UI Builder for WordPress. A simple way to create & save Theme Options and Meta Boxes for free or premium themes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 995 commits, 78 PRs in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Derek appears to be a back-end developer who was actively involved in the OptionTree project. Their commits focused on improving the functionality and maintainability of the theme option builder for WordPress. Contributions include addressing JS-related issues, preventing users from adding settings too deeply, and refactoring and refactoring code for efficient and appropriate use.
premium-themeswordpresswordpress-thememetabuilder
WordPress/two-factor
Jul 2015 - Nov 2015
Two-Factor Authentication for WordPress.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:80 commits, 19 PRs, 46 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions primarily involve setting up and maintaining the CI/CD pipeline, including integrating testing and code quality checks. They implemented Travis CI and coveralls support, along with PHPUnit for testing. Furthermore, the user configured JSHint and PHP CodeSniffer, and also incorporated YUI Compressor for JavaScript compression, to ensure code quality and automated build processes. They also modified the build environment to run tests.
wordpressphpauthenticationfactortwo-factor
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