Tom Nowell
Senior Software Engineer at Human Made
Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarTom Nowell is a senior software engineer based in Manchester with 17 years of experience building backend systems, developer tooling, and DevOps environments for WordPress and beyond. Currently at Human Made / Altis DXP, he blends hands-on engineering with platform-level thinking—shipping improvements to complex deployments and contributor-facing tooling. His open-source footprint includes maintainership-style work on WordPress Coding Standards and VVV, plus architectural fixes to the Spring RTS engine, showing a range from web platforms to game-engine internals. Formerly a VIP Launch Engineer at Automattic, he’s skilled at code quality, CI/PHPCS hygiene, and pragmatic refactors that reduce technical debt. Colleagues appreciate that he prefers in-person introductions at conferences, reflecting a developer who values real-world collaboration as much as clean commits.
17 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
9,821reputation
2.0mreached
43answers
82questions
swig
top-5%
loops
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matrix
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
c-language10
game-engine10
scripting10
wordpress10
bash10
coding-conventions10
system-design10
software-quality10
lua10
php10
script10
real-time-strategy10
yaml10
rt10
refactoring10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV
Jan 2017 - Jan 2023
An open source Vagrant configuration for developing with WordPress
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:17 releases, 235 reviews, 1666 commits in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the backend configuration and environment setup for a WordPress-based Vagrant environment. Their commits focused on the installation of PHP-based tools, the implementation of database backup functionality, and overall enhancements to the Vagrant configuration files. The user also made improvements to the environment's startup scripts and contributed to the website's user interface.
vagrantdevelopingvmsvarying-vagrant-vagrantswordpress
WordPress/WordPress-Coding-Standards
Jul 2018 - Jul 2018
PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) to enforce WordPress coding conventions
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 3 PRs, 49 comments in 10 days
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to deprecating and updating WordPress coding standards sniffs, specifically those related to VIP (Very Important Projects). Their work involved modifying existing PHP files, adding deprecation notices, and adjusting unit tests to reflect these changes. The contributions focus on maintaining and updating the code style rules to align with current best practices and prevent future compatibility issues. The user's commits also included fixes for formatting issues.
rulesetcoding-conventionswordpressphpphp-codesniffer-rules
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