Hi, I'm Sean.

I'm a software developer based in Crewe, Cheshire, UK, working mostly in PHP and Laravel. I graduated with a first class degree in Computer Science in 2006 and have been writing PHP professionally ever since — long enough to have opinions about most of it.

What I actually care about sits a level above the code: the architecture, and the thinking that should happen before anyone commits to a way of building something. Given a platform, I want to understand why it's shaped the way it is, where that shape is costing the business time or money, and what's genuinely worth changing versus what's just noise. The build itself tends to be the straightforward part once that thinking's been done properly.

Early days, and Divi

I was writing WordPress software from early on — starting with a membership plugin back in 2007, long before "WordPress developer" was a well-worn career path. Over the following decade I built up a catalogue of 20+ plugins, free and commercial, and became one of the more established developers building on top of Divi, one of the biggest page builder themes around. My plugins extended what Divi could actually do, and I spent a fair amount of time helping support and shape that ecosystem for the people building on it, not just shipping websites myself.

It's easy for that period to get read as "used to do WordPress sites," which undersells it. It was platform work — understanding somebody else's architecture well enough to extend it safely, at scale, for people I'd never meet. That's the same muscle I use now, just aimed at Laravel instead.

Events, e-commerce, and listening to real users

Towards the end of my WordPress years I picked up a client running a nationwide sporting goods retailer across several WooCommerce stores. The interesting part wasn't the storefronts, it was the warehouse — I ended up building a custom picking and packing system on top of WooCommerce, with barcode scanning, pick lists, pack lists and easy tracking-code updates, so warehouse staff never had to be trained on WooCommerce itself. That's the kind of job I like: the public-facing site is the easy 10%, the real value was in a process nobody outside the warehouse ever saw.

After that I spent a stretch as the sole developer on a large event management platform, built on CodeIgniter. I ended up rewriting most of it from the ground up, and tested a lot of it the unglamorous way — by actually attending the events it ran, watching where it held up and where it didn't, and making dynamic changes based on what clients and their attendees told me on the day. That loop — build something, watch someone genuinely rely on it, fix what's actually wrong rather than what I assumed was wrong — is probably my favourite part of this job, and it's the same instinct behind Helmr now.

Where I am now

These days my focus is Laravel, though React and plain JavaScript come up regularly too. I'm currently working with a company on a very large Laravel project, alongside other client work — fitting into an existing team, existing conventions and existing technical debt, rather than starting from a blank slate. Most of the value I add there is spotting where the architecture or the process around it is working against the team, and helping sort that out before it becomes someone's Friday afternoon emergency.

I also use AI tooling as a normal part of how I build software now — it speeds up the parts worth speeding up, and helped me get side projects like Laravel Periscope, Waymarq and Helmr out the door in evenings rather than months. I don't treat it as a replacement for understanding the system — I still read and own every line that ships under my name.

Outside of work

I live in Crewe with my family. Outside of client work I'm usually found on or around the water — I'm a qualified RYA dinghy instructor and work closely with the training team at Nantwich & Border Counties Sailing Club, helping others learn to sail. I've also spent ten years with the Sea Cadets, where I'm a qualified skill-at-arms instructor, teaching young people to safely handle and use firearms. Before all that I spent a good few years living on and restoring narrowboats — which explains a lingering, mostly-dormant interest in anything with an engine and a maintenance schedule.