All about me
Developer, musician, husband and dad - here's a little more about who I am.
I have deep, hands-on experience with Laravel and PHP, having worked with the framework daily for many years. I follow a test-driven development approach, writing thorough test suites with PHPUnit - and Pest where a project calls for it - to ensure the reliability and maintainability of every feature I build.
Code quality is a key focus of mine. I maintain strict coding standards and integrate tools like Laravel Pint, PHP CS Fixer, PHPStan, and Larastan into my workflows to enforce consistency and catch issues early.
On the frontend, I work primarily with Vue.js, using Inertia.js to deliver modern, single-page application experiences while keeping the power and simplicity of Laravel behind the scenes. I build UIs with Tailwind CSS, which allows me to prototype rapidly while keeping designs consistent and polished.
While the VILT stack is where I feel most at home, I'm comfortable working beyond it. I've built and shipped a full production mobile app with React Native and Expo, and I'm happy working in existing React codebases - many of the concepts carry over naturally from Vue. More recently I've become a big fan of Filament, which I reach for when building polished admin panels and internal tools.
For deployment, Laravel Cloud has become my default for new projects - as it's matured it's proven a genuinely compelling, fully-managed option that scales comfortably where a traditional VPS would start to struggle, and it pairs brilliantly with its new managed queues. I now run a growing number of apps on it, including this very site. Laravel Forge is still very much in my toolkit, particularly for existing apps and where a predictable, fixed-cost DigitalOcean droplet makes sense. I'm comfortable working directly over SSH when needed and regularly integrate with a range of common AWS services. While I have experience with Docker, I prefer using Laravel Herd for fast, streamlined local development.
I first started learning PHP in 2005 and never looked back. Watching the language evolve over the past 20 years has been amazing. I discovered Laravel in 2018, and it completely changed how I write my web apps.
Outside of development, I'm a keen amateur musician. I've been playing guitar since 2009 and love to play along to some of my favourite songs. In 2025, I also started to learn to play keyboard, expanding my love of music even further.
Most importantly, I also love spending time with my wife and our little girl who was born in 2024.