Tom Boutell
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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RockstarTom Boutell is a seasoned technology leader and CTO with 11 years of hands-on engineering and security-focused open-source work, based in Philadelphia. He leads Apostrophe Technologies and drives the apostrophecms ecosystem, blending product-minded architecture with pragmatic engineering. Notably, he has contributed significant security hardening to the widely used sanitize-html library—closing iframe validation, script injection, scheme-based exploits, and DoS vectors to reduce XSS risk. Tom pairs executive technical leadership with active code-level involvement, ensuring the platforms he oversees remain robust and safe for end users.
11 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
7,433reputation
1.0mreached
241answers
8questions
php
top-5%
Github Skills (14)
html-sanitization10
xss10
security10
php9
javascript9
nodejs9
regular-expression7
html6
disqus6
apostrophecms6
apostrophe6
pecl6
backbonejs6
mongodb6
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
apostrophecms/sanitize-html
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
Clean up user-submitted HTML, preserving whitelisted elements and whitelisted attributes on a per-element basis. Built on htmlparser2 for speed and tolerance
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:96 reviews, 63 commits, 125 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily focused on enhancing the security of the `sanitize-html` library. Their contributions involved addressing vulnerabilities related to iframe validation bypasses and script tag manipulation. Furthermore, the user implemented safeguards against scheme-based exploits and DoS attacks, demonstrating a proactive approach to security hardening. These changes focused on preventing potential cross-site scripting (XSS) and other malicious attacks that could compromise the library's integrity.
html-parser
apostrophecms-legacy/apostrophe-samples
Jun 2018 - Aug 2025
An Apostrophe website that demonstrates various techniques and will be linked to in documentation, stackoverflow answers, etc. Check it out to learn where that code is supposed to go!
Contributions:1 PR, 10 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 3 months
go
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