About Joseph

I started my career at an ecommerce company back when ecommerce was still new. There weren't any ready-made solutions that could handle what we needed. So I learned to program out of necessity. We had to build the systems ourselves to handle our sales volume.

What started as necessity became a passion. I actually enjoyed the development work. So I decided to really learn it properly. After getting solid with the fundamentals and building up experience, I went freelance. That was a long time ago now.

I've put in thousands of hours of hands-on development work. I can confidently say I'm at expert level now. Writing "The Art of Modern PHP 8" helped solidify that. The best way to learn is to teach, they say.

Today, I help businesses with large-scale PHP applications that handle serious volume. I clean up legacy codebases, tackle massive tech debt, and work in high-pressure environments where performance and reliability can't fail.

Somewhere in that stretch I got serious about how code actually gets tested and shipped. I've been building and operating CI infrastructure since 2014, first self-hosted Jenkins, then Travis, then my own phpqa tooling, then GitHub Actions. I've published continuously since 2015, eleven years of test infrastructure out in the open. The current guardrail and quality-gate work is the same problem, just applied to agents instead of humans.