Dan Davis-Boxleitner has been developing web sites since 1999.
The best websites let visitors find what they need quickly and easily, and they’re built on platforms that are fast, secure, accessible, and maintainable over the long run.
Summary: Drupal Architect and Senior Engineer with 12+ years of experience designing, modernizing, and supporting secure, scalable, and accessible (WCAG 2.1 AA) Drupal 8–11 platforms for high-traffic and multi-brand sites. I stabilize production systems, tune performance with Redis and cache strategy, and integrate CRM, marketing, and payment platforms on Acquia, Pantheon, and Upsun with CI/CD and automated testing. I also lead code reviews, mentor developers, and practice responsible AI-assisted development.
Objective: A Drupal architect or senior engineering role where I can own platform architecture, performance, and reliability, and help a team ship well-scoped, maintainable solutions.
Related Work Experience:
- September 2025 – October 2026: Rapid Development Group, Grand Rapids, MI. Senior Drupal Engineer.
- April 2022 – June 2025: Palantir.net, Evanston, IL. Senior Engineer.
- October 2018 – April 2022: Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Chicago, IL. Senior Developer.
- October 2016 – June 2018: Farm Journal Media, Chicago, IL. Solutions Architect.
- December 2015 – May 2016: Sandstorm Design, Chicago, IL. Engineer.
- April 2015 – September 2015: WebToMed, Des Plaines, IL. PHP Developer.
- February 2013 – Present: Clicklong Media, Evanston, IL. Founder, Director (independent consulting).
- December 2011 – January 2013: Solid State Depot, Boulder, CO. Founder, Chief.
- November 2010 – December 2011: Lighthouse Solar, Boulder, CO. Lead Web Developer.
- January 2010 – November 2010: Coaction Media, Boulder, CO. Director of Technology.
- August 2007 – November 2009: Artistic Digital Services, Evanston, IL. Programmer, Systems Administrator.
Recent Highlights:
- Stabilized a crash-prone, high-traffic Drupal 11 platform that serves 10+ brands from one codebase on Upsun, and led the Domain module 2.x to 3.x migration.
- Cut time to first byte by 20% through request profiling, Redis and cache bin tuning, cache tag and context refinement, and query optimization.
- Cut front-end build times by 87% (39s to 5.2s) by migrating from Webpack to Vite.
- Reduced malicious bot traffic by 80% with Cloudflare WAF rules, bot management, and rate limiting.
- Built accessible CKEditor 5 plugins that convert pasted images into Drupal Media entities and enforce alt text.
- Led the Drupal 10 migration of govst.edu, building WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility into content models, components, and migration workflows.
Education:
- Oakton Community College, Skokie, Illinois. Associate Degree, Liberal Arts, 2007.
- DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, Washington. Software engineering coursework.
- University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Software engineering coursework.
Skills:
- CMS: Drupal 7/8/9/10/11, CKEditor 5, WordPress, custom CMS solutions.
- Languages & frameworks: PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Vue, Symfony, HTML, CSS, SQL.
- Performance & infrastructure: Redis, cache strategy, Solr, MySQL, Linux (LAMP), Apache, Docker, AWS, Cloudflare.
- Hosting: Acquia, Pantheon, Upsun (Platform.sh).
- Testing & DevOps: CI/CD, GitHub Actions, PHPUnit, Behat, DDEV, Vite, Xdebug, New Relic, Infrastructure as Code.
- Integrations: REST, JSON:API, Salesforce, Stripe, Recurly, PayPal, Customer.io, CRM and event platforms.
- Accessibility: WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA.
- Practice: Code reviews, mentoring, technical scoping and estimation, technical design documentation, and responsible AI-assisted development.
- Background: Graphics programming in C++ and OpenGL.
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