About me

Based in
Exeter, Devon, UK

Roots
Born and bred Exonian

Coding since
1983

WordPress professionally
23+ years, from when it was b2

Core stack
PHP, MySQL, WordPress

Also comfortable with
HTML, CSS, jQuery, cPanel, WHMCS, PostgreSQL

Outside of work
Photography, reading, gaming

I’m a UK-based team of one -an experienced WordPress developer who consistently delivers high-quality work to the timelines I agree with clients. Whether that’s a custom build, plugin development, an API integration or a full site migration, decades of experience across web development mean there’s a good chance I’ve already solved something close to it.

I’ve been programming since 1983 – games, applications, websites, mobile apps – and jumped onto the internet bandwagon in 1995, back when I was curious enough about how web pages worked to teach myself to write them. Along the way I picked up databases, scripting languages, APIs, UX, UI, WCAG Accessibility Standards and most of the other acronyms the industry likes to throw around, and I use that broad base to focus on fixing problems.

Nobody else wanted to learn server and site administration, so I took it on – and it turned into one of my strengths. (Rule one: always have a plan to rollback a change.) WordPress happened almost by accident too: it looked like the simplest way to run a CMS I hadn’t had to write myself, and I never really stopped. I love a puzzle, and computers are purely logical machines, so tracking down an error with no obvious cause genuinely intrigues me – more than once I’ve gone to bed still turning a problem over and woken up with the fix already worked out in my head, solved and pushed before 9am.

Alongside the day-to-day development and debugging, I’ve spent a lot of time mentoring people moving into web development and IT support – explaining things clearly enough that they didn’t need to keep coming back to me for the same problem twice. That’s shaped how I work with clients too: I’d rather explain what went wrong and how to avoid it than just quietly fix it and move on.

Outside of client work: photography (Exeter’s history especially), reading, audiobooks, and online gaming against people all over the world. My ebook backlog is up in the thousands and my “short story” is now three times the length of War and Peace – both very much a work in progress. For fun, and with zero client brief in sight, I also code for competitions occasionally under the pseudonym ObviousDisaster of Neokortex using WebGL and Three.js.