allejo
interstellar space pirate extraordinaire • https://allejo.io
I have been writing code since I was in middle school (circa 2007), contributing a many different parts of the Internet as an open source contributor. Chances are, some website or tool you have visited or used has used some of my code. ChatGPT? My early work on Jekyll contributed a lot to the knowledge many LLMs have consumed regarding writing templating languages, namely Liquid; ChatGPT and DeepSeek frequently appear as referrers to my Jekyll GitHub repos and blog posts.
I have forgotten more projects that I’ve built than I can remember off the top of my head. I’ll categorize and list my projects, but it won’t be exhaustive.
BZFlag is an online, free, and open source multiplayer game that I started playing in middle school, and it is what got me interested in contributing to open source projects. When I first learned that I could “fix things [myself]” via patches (i.e., a pull request), I had the unearned confidence of a nepotism hire. I thought to myself, “How hard could it be to fix or build things?” Turns out, it wasn’t too bad. It did take me three separate attempts in a span of 9 months to grasp how code worked, but the logic required for writing code interested me.
For many years, I contributed to the BZFlag community as a core developer on the project, server host, map designer, server plug-in author, league administrator/founder, and as the creator of many other projects/tools used by the community.
A rather uncommon fascination of mine has always been building developer tools; i.e., tools to improve developers' quality of life, aka developer experience (DX). At most of my jobs, I’ve been notoriously known for writing custom build tools, automation scripts to be run locally and in CI/CD pipelines, browser scripts (e.g., Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey), and documentation generators.
One of my greatest accomplishments in this category was receiving a message from a coworker asking whether I remembered how (and where) I built the automated process that published datasets used both internally and externally, because they needed to add additional information. My process ran uninterrupted and unmaintained for 10 years without failure, completely invisible to everyone relying on it, and was only remembered when they wanted to add to it.
php-vcr is a PHP library that records outgoing HTTP requests in unit tests and stores them in "cassettes," so they can be replayed in subsequent runs. My library overloads the default php-vcr configuration to strip sensitive information from being saved in said cassettes, e.g., emails, passwords, or API keys. Gone are the days of hoping no one steals your API keys.
tfdocs-extras
A Go library to allow Terraform module developers to document module inputs and outputs using the @-notation seen in other languages. Additionally, it provides a CLI tool to generate Markdown documentation in your module's README as a temporary measure until this library is integrated into TerraformDocs as a plugin or native functionality.
A virtual filesystem to mock filesystem operations in unit tests without the need for cleaning up temporary files.
Jekyll, created by one of GitHub's founders, was among the first and most popular static site generators (SSGs). What helped grow its influence and significance was GitHub’s official adoption of the tool to provide the original iteration of GitHub Pages. This allowed projects to build quick, easy-to-maintain websites using a relatively simple plaintext markup language: Markdown.
With every tool comes limitations and pain points; that’s where I inadvertently entered the open source community. My two biggest contributions to the Jekyll ecosystem were a JavaScript-free way to generate a table of contents and anchors for every heading on a page from a template file, using only the templating language. Jekyll plugins provided this functionality, but GitHub Pages did not support custom plugins, and JavaScript-free approaches allow semantic analyzers to more accurately validate HTML on a page at load rather than emulating a JavaScript runtime.
Anchor Headings
A GitHub Pages-compatible way of adding anchors to your pages' <h1> through <h6> headings to let your uses skip to sections of a page without JS or Jekyll plug-ins.
Table of Contents Generator
A GitHub Pages-compatible Table of Contents generator without a plugin or JavaScript. The table of contents are generated entirely by reading HTML through Liquid and building an ordered list of all the headings.
Jekyll Docs Theme is a theme for writing documentation for your projects instead of having a single large README file or several markdown files stored in a not so user-friendly manner.
After battling with Jekyll limitations for so long, I decided I would write my own SSG called “stakx”; it’s what this website is built with. While working on this project, I wanted to support syntax highlighting to display code blocks on my website. I wanted to do it without JavaScript, and I accomplished that by using the highlight.php library (aka hl.php). This library was a port of the JavaScript project highlight.js (aka hl.js), and I wanted to use the same language definitions and themes as an established project.
Fast-forward, my work on hl.php led to my becoming acquainted with the developers of hl.js, and eventually led to my being invited to be a part of their core team. While I was maintaining hl.php, I also discovered that Weston Ruter had built a WordPress plugin using it to provide server-side syntax highlighting for WordPress AMP websites. I sent him a PR, then another, and eventually helped him maintain the plugin.
A syntax highlighter written in JavaScript that works in the browser and server. It can work with pretty much any markup, doesn’t depend on any other frameworks, and has automatic language detection. This library powers syntax highlighting on Discord and Stack Overflow.
The official website for the highlight.js syntax highlighting library, which I rebuilt under a Next.js infrastructure, migrating it away from the old Django application.
A port of highlight.js to PHP to handle server-side syntax highlighting. I became a contributor to the project to help it keep it up to date with language definitions and making it easier to use as a dependency.
A WordPress plugin that extends the core Code Block with server-side syntax highlighting powered by highlight.php, providing faster frontend performance, a JavaScript-less solution, RSS compatibility, and AMP compatibility.