Richard Van Velzen
Senior Developer at Let's Get Digital
Roden, Drenthe, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Van Velzen is a Senior Developer with 14 years of hands-on experience building robust back-end systems and developer tools from the Netherlands. He has a strong open-source footprint contributing to prominent JavaScript and PHP projects like terser, UglifyJS, and PHPStan, where he focused on edge-case bugfixes, type inference improvements and compression optimizations. Richard is comfortable across stacks—improving parsers, manglers and static analysis—bringing a pragmatic, detail-oriented approach to code correctness and performance. He has a track record of fixing platform-specific issues and improving developer ergonomics, such as Windows compatibility and clearer stack traces. Currently at Let's Get Digital after senior roles at GoReply and a long tenure at Frank, he blends steady seniority with a hands-on engineer’s curiosity. Colleagues would notice his knack for finding subtle edge cases that prevent rare but critical failures.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
HAVO, HAVO at Dr. Nassau College
English
Stackoverflow
184reputation
7kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (53)
code-optimization10
static-code-analysis10
debug10
javascript10
type-inference10
static-analysis10
parser10
compress10
testing10
windows10
command-line-interface10
manipulation10
minification10
compatibility10
uglifyjs10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
phpstan/phpstan-src
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
PHPStan's source code. This is where development happens. Check https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan for the distribution repository.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:73 reviews, 162 commits, 151 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the source code of PHPStan, a static analysis tool for PHP. Their contributions focused on improving the tool's type inference capabilities, especially around conditional return types, intersections, and various PHP features. The code changes included modifications to handle more complex scenarios related to template types, array operations, and function return types, enhancing the tool's ability to provide accurate code analysis. These contributions directly improved PHPStan's accuracy and reliability.
phpstatic-code-analysisphpstanphp7static-analysis
phpstan/phpdoc-parser
Mar 2022 - Oct 2022
Next-gen phpDoc parser with support for intersection types and generics
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:10 reviews, 27 commits, 27 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on extending the phpDoc parser to support new features and syntax, specifically around multiline callable types and conditional types. They implemented the parsing logic for these new type annotations, adding tests to validate the correct parsing of various scenarios, including nested and multiline structures. The commits also included refactoring and improvements to the existing code, particularly around the handling of whitespace and the introduction of new assertion syntax.
static-analyzertestingphpphpdocstatic-code-analysis
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