Russell Heimlich
Principal Software Developer at Alley
Ilchester, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRussell Heimlich is a Principal Software Developer with 14 years of experience building high-performance, content-focused websites—specializing in custom WordPress architecture and progressive enhancement so projects remain accessible and resilient. He has led migrations, replatforming, and component-driven development at organizations from startups to nonprofits, creating living style guides and more than 70 custom Gutenberg blocks to streamline design and engineering collaboration. Russell pairs front- and back-end expertise with practical DevOps experience (AWS-hosted WordPress at scale) and has shipped interactive data visualizations and bespoke analytics migrations. An active contributor to open-source projects like the backend of dummyimage.com, he focuses on code quality, refactors, and robustness fixes that reduce runtime notices and edge-case bugs. Based in Ilchester, MD, he blends hands-on engineering with cross-team leadership, often surfacing small but impactful infrastructure and UX improvements that teams overlook.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS Digital Media Production, BS Digital Media Production at The Art Institute of PhiladelphiaHammond High School
javascript, html, css, php
Stackoverflow
284reputation
10kreached
6answers
3questions
Github Skills (14)
php10
formatting10
text-formatting10
phpunit9
web-development9
aws-lambda6
gulp6
lambda6
aws-apigateway6
css6
csv6
amazon-web-services6
content-type6
mysql6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
kingkool68/dummyimage
Jul 2016 - Nov 2021
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 commits, 7 PRs, 30 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Russell primarily focused on improving the codebase's quality and maintainability of the dummyimage project. Their contributions involved cleaning up code formatting, removing unnecessary elements, and refactoring deprecated code. They also implemented changes to address potential PHP notices, ensuring the application's robustness, and corrected the extraction of query parameters. Furthermore, the user addressed URL-related issues and fixed the extraction of text parameters within the codebase.
dummy-imagescode-behindphpdummyimageplaceholder-image
kingkool68/wordpress-rh-starter-theme
Feb 2023 - Feb 2025
My preferred WordPress starter theme
Contributions:4 PRs, 57 pushes, 6 branches in 2 years
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