Thanks for stopping by! My name's Rob and this is my little home on the Internet.

The intent of this page is to summarise who I am, what I do, and what my professional goals are.

Who am I?

I am a middle-aged guy with a keen interest in software, from using to creating. Since I got my first computer back in 1994-ish and immediately took it apart (much to the horror of my parents), I quickly realised that software can change quicker than hardware and comes with much less risk of irrevocably breaking. Off I went down a rabbit hole that 30 years later I'm still very deep in.

From Basic through to Pascal, C/C++, and Rust through to Java, PHP, Kotlin and Javascript, I've played with a lot of languages over the years and my absolute favourite has to be PHP. It's easily accessible these days with Docker and has plenty of support to get up and running in the cloud or on hosted servers, and is a very straightforward language to write code in.

Who am I not?

I am not a designer 🤣. There's something magical about design that needs something extra, people who can do it well are great and any project with a user-facing frontend should be properly designed.

I do not have that bit of magic in me, however, I can follow a design and create it. So that's a bonus.

What have I done?

I've wanted to be a computer programmer since I was at school but only recently have I been able to move into the field. I've done many years of Customer Service (facing, and telephone based), and done a stint of Taxi driving (working in the family business for 7 years).

I believe the experiences of dealing with customers sets me apart from a lot of devs that just want to focus on the code - it's given me an insight into how the likes of stakeholders, managers, and end users / customers operate, and it allows me to communicate much easier with non-technical folks.

Since 2018 I've been working my way up the ladder as a software developer starting out as a junior and working through positions as a senior developer, tech lead, and team leader. Having nearly 20 years of hobby experience showed quickly that I wasn't at junior level, even though that was my first commercial position.

What do I do?

My preferred terrain is the back end - PHP on servers or in the cloud running services list REST APIs or Microservices. JavaScript or Typescript for scripts on servers (usually interacting with 3rd party APIs).

I'm equally at home using plain PHP with no frameworks or using Laravel or Symfony to build with, and I have a huge interest in Domain-driven design and I'm actively developing a couple of projects using it.

I do quite enjoy React on the front end, but I feel like I'm writing backend code when I'm doing it because of the functional nature of it all nowadays.

Professionally, I'm a senior backend developer working in a small team re-writing the company's core product including full stack responsibilities across a mobile app (React Native), web app (React), and backend APIs (Laravel).

My professional goals

I'm still exploring this area. I've been in most developer positions apart from really leading a progressive team so that's something I'm very interested in. Provided I still get a bit of time to cut some code every now and then.

Further to that, I like the idea of going into a business that maybe hasn't got their processes fully down or needs a few pointers for optimisations and improvements. Planning a fixed-period path from current position to some agreed-on target, then leaving when the team is purring along smoothly.

Contact

I'm starting to become active on Threads, would love for you to give me a follow on there and connect - @sourcepotrob