Jesse Donat
Senior Software Engineer at Renaissance Learning
Hopkins, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJesse Donat is a senior software engineer with 15 years of experience building and evolving large‑scale EdTech reading platforms used by hundreds of thousands of students daily. Based in Hopkins, MN, he is a polyglot back-end developer comfortable with PHP, Go, and TypeScript, and has progressed from hands-on developer to lead roles managing teams and integrations. Jesse is an active open-source contributor—helping maintain widely used projects like DefinitelyTyped and improving PHP libraries such as PHP-SQL-Parser and PHP_CodeSniffer—demonstrating attention to type safety, testing, and backwards compatibility. He excels at refactoring legacy systems into class-based, testable code and adding pragmatic features like streaming ZIP output and richer user-agent parsing. Colleagues rely on him to balance shipping product features with long-term code health and developer ergonomics.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree, Computer Software Engineering, Associate's degree, Computer Software Engineering at Brown CollegeHopkins High
English
Stackoverflow
3,243reputation
260kreached
46answers
28questions
php
top-5%
Github Skills (34)
sql-parser10
typesc10
user-agent10
testing10
code-standards10
typescript10
coding-conventions10
typescript-definitions10
browser10
type-definition10
type-system10
stream10
automation10
php10
parsing10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
donatj/PhpUserAgent
Mar 2011 - Nov 2022
Lightning Fast, Minimalist PHP User Agent String Parser.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 releases, 388 commits, 65 PRs in 11 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily contributed to expanding the project's user agent parsing capabilities, adding support for new browsers, devices, and operating systems. They implemented parsing rules for Kindle, Camino, and various mobile devices, including iOS and Windows Phone. The user also improved the accuracy of the parser by correcting existing tests and adding new test cases. They refactored code for improved readability and maintenance.
browseragentstringminimalistuser-agent-string
maennchen/ZipStream-PHP
Nov 2014 - Apr 2019
:floppy_disk: PHP ZIP Streaming Library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 57 commits, 4 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily focused on enhancing the `zipstream-php` library. Their contributions include adding new functionalities like `add_file_from_stream` and output stream support, along with implementing code corrections for PHP version compatibility, specifically addressing issues related to hashing functions. Further improvements involve the addition of file and header management and the correction of existing comments. The user’s work demonstrates a focus on extending the library's capabilities and improving its compatibility and reliability.
stream-httpdiskphpstreamsstreaming
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