Kris Wallsmith
VP Of Engineering at Vacatia
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKris Wallsmith is a seasoned engineering leader with 16 years of hands-on software and open-source experience, currently serving as VP of Engineering at Vacatia and CTO of PICKATHON in Portland, Oregon. He brings deep backend expertise in PHP and the Symfony ecosystem, with significant contributions to widely used projects like Doctrine, Symfony components (security, routing, console, http-kernel), and his own Assetic asset pipeline. Known for pragmatic refactoring, reliability fixes, and improving developer ergonomics, Kris focuses on maintainability, tooling, and observability—adding features like Request::fromGlobals(), logging for MongoDB cursors, and profiler enhancements. He combines executive leadership with active code-level involvement, frequently improving tests, interfaces, and dependency injection internals. A liberal arts graduate in Theater and Religious Studies from Wesleyan, he pairs technical rigor with creative problem-solving and an unusual background that helps him communicate across engineering and nontechnical stakeholders.
16 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Theater & Religious Studies, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Theater & Religious Studies at Wesleyan University
Stackoverflow
8,955reputation
493kreached
60answers
0questions
forms
top-5%
php
top-5%
caching
top-5%
yaml
top-5%
ajax
top-5%
twig
top-1%
Github Skills (67)
url-routing10
annotations10
testing10
http10
interface-design10
query-building10
refactor10
phpunit10
security10
symfony-ux10
refactoring10
react-components10
routers10
component-development10
bundle10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
symfony/assetic-bundle
Feb 2011 - Dec 2015
[DEPRECATED] This was the recommended way to manage web assets in Symfony 2 applications. Newer Symfony applications should use Webpack Encore.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:239 commits, 4 PRs, 4 pushes in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Kris primarily contributed to the AsseticBundle, focusing on improving configuration and adding features to the controller. Their work included updating configurations for filters, adding local caching to the controller, and renaming a controller class. The user also made adjustments to the underlying caching mechanisms used, and updated the integration of the bundle with the routing system.
bundlephpsymfony-bundlenewerassets
kriswallsmith/assetic
Jan 2011 - Feb 2016
Asset Management for PHP
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:717 commits, 9 PRs, 11 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Kris contributed to the asset management system, implementing core features such as asset creation, loading, and dumping. They were involved in adding and integrating filters into the asset processing pipeline, along with introducing support for file-based assets and HTTP assets. Furthermore, they made improvements to the asset collection functionality by enabling the removal and replacement of individual assets within a collection.
ltsphpassetphp-librarylaravel
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