I’m 22 years old and currently living in Coulsdon, Surrey with my beautiful wife Kara, our adorable son Ethan and our many pets (cats, dog, fish).

I’ve always been into web development. I love creating things. I’ve tried my hand at all aspects of web development, from front end including graphic design to system setup and of course to back end development. Everything I know at the moment has been self taught either through tutorials, from working around other developers or from good old trial and error. A LOT of trial and error.

I used to say that PHP is my main language, but I love working with Javascript so much that it’s becoming a strong competitor. Yes I work with PHP every day and all of my server side code is in the language, but there is something about working with Javascript – especially since the introduction of the popular libraries – that just can’t be beat.

Unlike a lot of people I work with or developers I talk to, I never went to University and so was never introduced to web development in any traditional way but it also means I’ve been determined to specialise in PHP development. Of course I’m open to branching out and learning other languages – the more the better – but from what I can foresee, I think I will always stay in the web development field.

I’ve been working in e-commerce development for a while now, covering all scenarios to do with the field, from the odd web site to developing fully loaded commercial level e-commerce platforms and I’m pretty confident that I can deal with any aspect of an e-commerce site.

My focus lately has been on integrating third party services or products with e-commerce platforms to provide seamless experiences for the end user. There are a number of services or products that have reputations of being hard or impossible to integrate with and it is these services or products that I am determined to find a way to work with.

I am always looking for ways to challenge myself so if you have a project you believe I would be well suited for, please let me know.

My current skill set;

PHP

  • OOP
  • MVC architecture
  • Design patterns
  • Agile Software Development
  • Symfony. Symfony is an MVC based framework for PHP. More information can be found here. I’ve done a number of projects in this framework and feel very confident about my capabilities with it.
  • Silverstripe. Silverstripe is a very nice CMS platform with a nice sized community. It is written on top of the Sapphire PHP framework, developed by the same people. More information can be found here.
  • Magento. Magento is a very strong platform offering almost everything you could want to do with e-commerce. More information can be found here.
  • Ability to consume any type of web service (SOAP, RESTful, cURL etc).

MySQL

  • Stored procedures
  • Triggers
  • Strong SQL

Javascript

  • Ajax
  • Literal object notation
  • Client side pseudo MVC pattern
  • jQuery. I’ve been using jQuery for a number of years now and pretty much everything I do in javascript is now done in jQuery. From my point of view it’s the best javascript library currently available. More information can be found here.

Flex

  • Modular applications
  • Communication with back end systems using RESTful web services written in PHP.

(X)HTML
XML
CSS
Linux
Apache
Subversion

Various applications and buzz words etc :)
Web 2.0. Microsoft Windows. Ubuntu. Zend IDE. RESTful web services. SOAP.