About

Over twenty years of PHP, aimed at systems that cannot afford to stop.

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.

Role: Technical LeadDeploy Ecommerce
Focus: Operations, debugging, integrationsSecurity, internal tools, AI-assisted engineering
Platforms: Adobe Commerce, Magento, LaravelPHP 4 through 8.5
Open source: Packages and core contributions
Based: United Kingdom
Elsewhere: GitHub, Packagist, Bluesky

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 few hip surgeries 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