# About me

Canonical: https://joelbutcher.dev/about

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.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/joelbutcher)
- [X](https://x.com/joelbutcher_dev)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joelbutcher.bsky.social)

## 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.

Contact: https://joelbutcher.dev/contact