Greg Aker is a seasoned engineering leader with 16 years of experience building cloud-native platforms and running mission-critical infrastructure from Columbia, Missouri. As VP of Engineering at Vinli he architected a multi-cloud, Kubernetes-first connected car platform that processes billions of requests and helped earn industry recognition for its open APIs and developer ecosystem. He led a successful technology transition from Node.js to Go to improve scalability and cost-efficiency, and has deep hands-on SRE/devops expertise from running pre-1.0 Kubernetes in production to designing OTA device update pipelines. A long-time contributor to PHP and Python open-source projects (including core work on CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine and JSON:API support for Django REST Framework), he blends framework-level bug-fixing with platform-scale system design. Equally comfortable writing tests, serializers and hosting control panels, Greg pairs pragmatic engineering with a musician’s attention to detail—his background in music underscores a pattern-oriented, disciplined approach to complex systems.
16 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Music, Bachelor's Degree Music at University of Northern Iowa
ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich, free open-source content management platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world to easily manage their web site.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1887 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Greg's commits primarily involve modifications to the core functionality of the ExpressionEngine CMS, focusing on back-end logic. The commits include updates to the comment module, search module, and content publishing functionality, indicating involvement with core features and data management. Additionally, the user demonstrates a familiarity with database interactions and form handling within the framework, incorporating PHP-based code.
Open Source PHP Framework (originally from EllisLab)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:245 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Greg primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the CodeIgniter framework. Their work involved modifying the inflector helper to correctly pluralize words ending in specific characters, fixing issues in the file helper to return boolean values on failure, and addressing database driver problems related to identifier escaping. Additionally, the user fixed a bug related to the zip library and date issues in the same library.
phpframeworkphp-frameworkphp7php8
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