About me
I build bespoke, complex Laravel and PHP applications that are secure, modular and built to last, not marketing sites or simple admin panels. I’m frontend agnostic: React, Vue, Livewire or whatever your team already uses.
How I like to work
I’m Joel. I enjoy the moment a complicated system starts to make sense: finding the right boundary, making a careful change, and helping a team feel confident about what comes next. I like working through the options together, then turning the useful ideas into code people can keep changing.
Security is part of the design, not a review at the end. That means identity, tenant isolation, least-privilege access and threat modelling while the design is still cheap to change.
In AI-assisted engineering, I advocate for spec-driven development, architectural guardrails, quality checks and human review.
What I’ve worked on
I’m a senior software engineer with more than ten years of writing secure, performant software. That includes marketing optimisation tools, student union administration systems and multi-tenant architecture for systems serving many consuming applications and SPAs.
My specialism is bespoke, complex Laravel and PHP applications: multi-tenant platforms, domain-driven and hexagonal design, modular monoliths with boundaries enforced by tooling, and event-sourced systems with a complete, auditable history. I also work on identity and authentication, and on quality gates such as static analysis, mutation testing and typed error handling.
What I’m studying
I’m studying for the CSSLP, which covers security across the whole software lifecycle. It sharpens how I threat model and review designs.
Open source
I contribute to open-source work in the Laravel and PHP communities, including Cachet, the open-source status page.
I’m particularly interested in making expected failures and missing values explicit with Result and Option types. I’ve championed them as a clearer alternative to exceptions and nulls.
I’m also building an event-sourced billing system for regulated organisations. It is work in progress, so there is no public link yet.
Away from the keyboard
Away from the keyboard, it’s mostly music and technology. I play electric guitar, and I play on the worship team at Alive Church Lincoln.
Around the house it’s Apple hardware and a clean, tidy desk, and I drive a Tesla Model Y. I like things that are quietly well made, and this site borrows from them: one continuous signal path, a strict grid and controls that put the information first.
Find me elsewhere
I share code on GitHub and shorter thoughts on X and Bluesky.
Want to talk about your Laravel application?
A few lines about your application and your team are enough to start. I reply within 2 working days.