Samuel Hilson
Software Engineer at Wizards of the Coast
Huntsville, Alabama, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Hilson is a seasoned software engineer with 11 years of professional experience, currently building features at Wizards of the Coast for D&D Beyond. He has a strong background in PHP and single-page applications, having driven core platform work on large-scale gaming wiki systems at Fandom/Curse and built mission-critical web apps for government and enterprise clients. Samuel blends backend reliability and front-end polish—he contributed bug fixes and profile-system improvements to the popular open-source Vanilla forum project. His career began in the Navy as an electronics technician, which informs his disciplined approach to systems and security, and he holds a B.S. in Information Technology with high academic distinction. Based in Huntsville, Alabama, he’s comfortable taking ownership of SaaS products and complex integrations while mentoring teams and improving development workflows. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who consistently turns messy legacy codebases into maintainable, production-ready systems.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.), Multimedia, Web Design and Development, 4.0, Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.), Multimedia, Web Design and Development, 4.0 at South Arkansas University TechBachelor of Science (B.S.), Information Technology, 3.88, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Information Technology, 3.88 at University of Phoenix
Stackoverflow
16reputation
2kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (9)
php10
vanilla-forums10
forum10
message-board9
javascript8
laravel-valet6
windows-subsystem-for-linux6
ubuntu6
mysql5
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
vanilla/vanilla
Aug 2015 - Mar 2016
Vanilla is a powerfully simple discussion forum you can easily customize to make as unique as your community.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 6 PRs, 22 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the core functionality of the Vanilla forum software. Their contributions include resolving issues related to JavaScript file loading on profile pages, preventing undefined object notices, and modifying how profile data is retrieved and used. They also worked on updating the code to use `data()` with a default value and enhancing the `ProfileExtender` plugin.
vanilla-forumssimple-discussionphpforumdiscussion-board
valeryan/multi-root-example
Aug 2019 - Mar 2024
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 7 months
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