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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
    4 badges
    Core Contributor '15 Core Team '20 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
    67contributions
    high55
    medium12
    score177
    Last 90 days
    173contributions
    high144
    medium29
    score461
    Last 12 months
    620contributions
    high459
    medium161
    score1538

    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
    September 2026
    Sep 29 Tue · 20:59
    Core med
    Closed ticket #53860 on Core Trac:
    REST API returns special characters as Unicode Decimal Code
    Sep 29 Tue · 20:55
    Core med
    Closed pull request #8281 on WordPress/wordpress-develop:
    Fix the rest api special characters
    Sep 29 Tue · 20:42
    Core med
    Closed ticket #61455 on Core Trac:
    wp_kses & block parser being used on pre_term_name hook
    Sep 29 Tue · 20:34
    Core med
    Closed pull request #6645 on WordPress/wordpress-develop:
    `safecss_filter_attr()` should support query strings with `&` as used by Gutenberg
    Sep 29 Tue · 20:04
    Core med
    Closed ticket #51482 on Core Trac:
    wp_kses_post should filter javascript content as well as the <script> tags
    Sep 29 Tue · 19:51
    Core med
    Closed ticket #48873 on Core Trac:
    CSS Selectors in style tags containing greater than signs are escaped
    Sep 29 Tue · 19:20
    Core med
    Closed ticket #58377 on Core Trac:
    wp_kses filters custom block name with consecutive hyphens
    Sep 29 Tue · 19:15
    Core med
    Closed ticket #52333 on Core Trac:
    Lack of the &colon; entity on the list of allowed entity names in kses.php
    Sep 29 Tue · 19:10
    Core med
    Closed ticket #25851 on Core Trac:
    post_content lost when inserting Posts with large base64-encoded images
    Sep 29 Tue · 19:01
    Core med
    Closed pull request #6577 on WordPress/wordpress-develop:
    improve regex to not break HTML comments