Hiking
Long days and high ground. The best architecture decisions I have made were made about four hours into a walk.
About
I lead development and maintenance for merchants whose platforms carry real money every hour of the day. The interesting part is rarely the feature. It is the integration that retries, the patch nobody read or the fault that only shows up at peak.
I started with PHP 4, on shared hosting, in an era when deployment meant FTP and hope. Everything since has been a slow lesson in what actually keeps systems alive: boring releases, honest logging, and knowing which failure modes you have chosen to accept.
Today I am Technical Lead at Deploy Ecommerce, working across Adobe Commerce, Magento and Laravel. My week splits between keeping stores trading, connecting them to the ERP, warehouse and third-party systems that run the business behind the storefront, and building internal tools that take manual process off people who have better things to do.
The work I get called for most is diagnosis. When a fault crosses system boundaries, when two vendors each insist the problem is at the other end, when it cannot be reproduced on staging, that is usually when the phone rings. I work the same way every time: gather evidence before forming a theory, rank the competing explanations, then prove one of them wrong.
I also write and publish open source, contribute to Magento core and answer more questions than I ask in the Adobe Commerce, Mage-OS and wider PHP communities. Most of what I release started life as something a merchant needed on a Tuesday.
Personal life
I grew up with Perthes disease, which took the top off my right hip as a child. Four years in a wheelchair, a year of rehabilitation, and a prognosis that said I would not walk again. That turned out to be wrong, though it took until 2019 and a total hip replacement to properly settle the argument. It is the reason the hiking below is not a throwaway line about hobbies.
I have also been fortunate enough to travel a lot, which has done more for how I think about work than any framework has. Mostly it teaches the same lesson the hills do: plan properly, then be willing to change the plan once you can see the ground.
Away from the keyboard
Long days and high ground. The best architecture decisions I have made were made about four hours into a walk.
A practice in consistency, which is the same skill as shipping every week rather than heroically once a quarter.
Endurance, engineering and escape, in roughly that order depending on the weather.
Running
StatusResults
Records
Strava profile →Best effort at each distance across every run Strava has timed for me. Powered by Strava.
Activities
Strava profile →Last 10 of 728 runs, rides and hikes synced from Strava, updated hourly. Powered by Strava.
Active in the Adobe Commerce, Mage-OS and wider PHP communities: packages, patches, talks and answers.
You’re welcome to contact me for architecture reviews, integration second opinions and talks.