Dane Powell

Principal Software Engineer at Acquia

Dane has been building enterprise Drupal websites since 2008. He has led and enabled technical teams across a variety of industries on projects ranging in scale from one-off decoupled sites for conferences to multi-thousand tenant multisite platforms for financial services agencies. He works with customers and partners to transform business requirements into technical solutions that exceed expectations, enjoys solving hard problems, and always aims to enable customers and partners to do the same.

Dane is also an active member of and regular contributor to Drupal and the larger open-source community. He has contributed and maintained several enterprise modules, contributed over 1000 patches, commits, or pull requests, and is currently a maintainer of BLT, an automation framework for Drupal. He has also presented at several Drupal camps, with a focus on configuration management and automation.

Outside of Drupal, Dane is a regular contributor to open-source projects (such as Serverless and Symfony) and enjoys developing for a number of other ecosystems including Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Android. He is the creator and maintainer of several Alexa Skills and Android apps on the Google Play store. Several of these are open source and make use of server-side components such as Node.js and MongoDB. Through his work, he has also discovered and responsibly disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities in popular enterprise applications.

Prior to joining the Drupal community, Dane was a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow at Rice University and Johnson Space Center, where he researched human-computer interaction and developed haptic teleoperation interfaces for NASA’s Robonaut program. His other interests include rock climbing, traveling, and spending time outdoors.