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Dennis Snell

Software Design Engineer at Automattic

@dmsnell Tucson, AZ, USA joined Jan 2014

fluffyandflakey.blog github.com/dmsnell Slack: @dmsnell
    Maintains Charset Formatting HTML API
    Teams Core

    Bio

    As a Code Wrangler at Automattic, Inc., I spend my days designing software. As a nomad, I own very few things and enjoy living simply. I love cooking, engineering, photography, and my faithful God, Jesus Christ.

    Interests

    I’m passionate about programming theory, engineering design, and teaching software design. If you want to meet up at a WordCamp we could spend hours into the night discussing any problem no matter how big or small and get out our laptops to explore some ideas together.

    WordPress Origin Story

    At the time I found WordPress I had been building primitive CMS systems out of Google Docs, Smarty, and FCKEditor – what a different world! Once I realized that I could have a fully-fledged website building system for free and which got better as time passed I was hooked and abandoned all of my custom website coding.

    Badges

    CODE
    5 badges
    Core Contributor '15 Core Team '20 Meta Contributor '26 P Playground Contributor '25 P Playground Team '25
    CONTENT
    1 badge
    Documentation Contributor '23
    COMMUNITY
    1 badge
    WordCamp Speaker '15

    Current Job

    Software Design Engineer
    Present
    Automattic

    Recent impact

    Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

    Last 30 days
    59contributions
    high46
    medium13
    score151
    Last 90 days
    168contributions
    high127
    medium41
    score422
    Last 12 months
    618contributions
    high462
    medium156
    score1542

    Team focus

    Share of contributions across teams during the last 365 days

    WordPress releases

    Contributed to 20 releases
    • 7.1
    • 7.0
    • 6.9
    • 6.8
    • 6.7
    • 6.6
    • 6.5
    • 6.4
    • 6.3
    • 6.2
    • 6.1
    • 6.0
    • 5.9
    • 5.3
    • 5.2
    • 5.1
    • 5.0
    • 4.7
    • 4.5
    • 4.3

    Time commitment

    40 hours per week of sponsored contribution time

    Contributions

    Type
    November 2026
    Nov 10 Tue · 19:20
    Core med
    Submitted pull request #86624 to WordPress/gutenberg:
    Blocks: Remove PHP parser from Gutenberg.
    Nov 04 Wed · 22:17
    Core med
    Submitted pull request #15480 to WordPress/wordpress-develop:
    Build/Test Tools: Check invariants while the PHPUnit suite runs.
    Nov 04 Wed · 21:36
    Core high
    Mentioned in [65268] on WordPress SVN:
    KSES: Clarify that `valid_unicode()` checks XML Char ranges.
    Nov 03 Tue · 18:02
    Core high
    Mentioned in [65247] on WordPress SVN:
    Docs: Move the `oembed_min_max_width` shape to its docblock.
    Nov 03 Tue · 17:39
    Core high
    Mentioned in [65245] on WordPress SVN:
    Tests: Compare HTML semantically in the `serialize_token()` attribute test.
    Nov 03 Tue · 07:30
    Core high
    Mentioned in [65221] on WordPress SVN:
    HTML API: Remove redundant after_tag() call.
    Nov 03 Tue · 05:58
    Core high
    Mentioned in [65220] on WordPress SVN:
    HTML API: Type tag queries and tag names for PHPStan.
    October 2026
    Oct 31 Sat · 20:55
    Core med
    Submitted pull request #15302 to WordPress/wordpress-develop:
    HTML API: Run analysis and benchmarking in CI
    Oct 31 Sat · 16:50
    Core med
    Created ticket #66430 on Core Trac:
    HTML API: Establish CI runner for analyzing changes against ...
    Oct 31 Sat · 15:53
    Core high
    Merged pull request #86073 into WordPress/gutenberg:
    Blocks: Fix duplicated content when implicitly closing a final open block.