About me

Overview

I'm a JavaScript and PHP specialist, and at different times have sold myself as both or either. In JavaScript Land I'm mostly in the Vue.js camp. I have a Stack Overflow rep of ~32K.

I currently head up development at Hello Lamp Post. I've built everything from award-winning virtual learning and assessment environments to headless CMS's to static site generators (SSG) in my time. You can read more on the Projects page or on my Linked In.

I've worked in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod (also Russia), London and elsewhere. I was Senior Developer at Espresso Education (later bought by Discovery Education) until 2015, so I know a fair bit about e-learning.

Skills

I know some stuff.

• JavaScript
  • Native JS (ECMA 12+)
  • Vue + ecosystem (Nuxt, Vuex, etc.) - recruiters, note: I'm a Vue guy, not a React guy
  • Node & Express
  • NPM (using and publishing)
  • Tests (e.g. Jest)
  • jQuery (yay for retro)
• PHP / LAMP
  • PHP v.8
  • Code Igniter & (some) Symfony
  • Composer
  • MySQL / MariaDB
  • Tests (e.g. PHPUnit)
  • Dynamic image generation (e.g. GD)
  • Scrapers (I seem to have built a lot of these)
• Misc.
  • CSS frameworks/processors - SASS, Bulma/Buefy, Tailwind, Bootstrap
  • Headless - Contentful (contributor), Cosmic, GraphQL (I've also built a headless CMS)
  • Git (inc. Pages, Actions, Flow)
  • Docker
  • XSLT
  • OOP
  • RegExp (I'm a RegExp sadist)
  • Browser extensions (example 1; example 2)

Writing

I've written tutorials and articles in the past for trade press including .NET Magazine and Smashing Magazine.

These days I blog here and write deep-dive JavaScript guides, such as this one about JavaScript promises.

I've featured a couple of times in JavaScript Daily. I was also technical editor on the (terrible) Smashing jQuery.

Personal

I'm a musician, mainly a pianist, with a degree in piano and composition. I have a fledgling YouTube channel where I post my recordings. I also dabble with synthesisers.

I'm a passionate vegan and animal lover. Animal lovers are vegan. It's also increasingly believed that veganism is the single best thing we can do as individuals to fight the climate crisis.

I lived for four years in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. I speak Russian. I used to be a tennis coach. I don't tweet.

You can contact me at [email protected].