About Me
I'm Joseph Edmonds. I build systems that actually work, from PHP platforms to the guardrails that keep AI-assisted delivery honest. 25 years turning messy legacy codebases, and now messy agent output, into clean, high-performance systems. I work remotely from West Yorkshire, UK. No bullshit, just results.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I don't publish client case studies. The work is confidential, and staying that way is part of the deal. If you want more detail, get in touch and we can discuss directly. What I can say here:
- Technical leadership for the businesses I work with: I own architecture, run production infrastructure, and deliver what actually ships. Agent-driven work is gated by my own tooling, and external agencies work to standards I set.
- High-availability Proxmox clusters, managed entirely as code.
- Automated error detection, deduplication, and first-pass triage through the GitHub API, built and run in production.
My Journey
I started at an online musical instrument startup in the early 2000s, back when ecommerce was still new. I ran everything operational: buying, warehousing, customer service, marketing, the website. When we couldn't hire a developer to automate the warehouse, I taught myself PHP and built it. That automation transformed peak season, and the SEO work I did alongside it took us to around a million indexed pages.
What started as necessity became the career. In 2007 I went out on my own and founded Edmonds Commerce, a specialist ecommerce development agency that I grew to a fifteen-person team serving payment processors, fintechs, startups and B2C/B2B retailers. These days I trade as LTS Commerce Ltd, but the company is just the wrapper. What you're hiring is me. The LTS stands for Long Term Support, because that's how I work: retained, ongoing relationships. Some of mine have run continuously for more than fifteen years.
Twenty-five years in, 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.
Throughout, my focus has been ecommerce, and particularly the harder end of it: large catalogues, complex functionality, specialist requirements that off-the-shelf platforms can't meet. That's where bespoke development pays off: capabilities and USPs your competitors can't buy off the shelf.
And today my focus is on AI-driven development processes and business automation. AI is the most powerful and most dangerous tool this industry has ever handed us, and my work now is harnessing the beast: putting it to work at full speed, inside guardrails that keep it honest.
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 test infrastructure in the open continuously since 2015. The current guardrail and quality-gate work is the same problem, just applied to agents instead of humans.
Philosophy
Straight talking comes first. I'll tell you if you're being stupid, and I'll tell you if something is shit. Politely, with reasons, but I won't tell you what you want to hear. When the wrong technical decision can cost your business heavily, honest guidance is worth more than a comfortable meeting.
I write clean, maintainable code that lasts. Every solution should be scalable, secure, and simple to understand. Technology should serve the business, not complicate it. When I fix a bug I write the rule that catches its whole class first, then use it to find every other instance, Defence Before Fix.
Expertise Areas
Agentic Delivery Governance
Containment, policy enforcement, and automated quality gates for AI-assisted development: sandboxed agent environments, guardrail design, and the QA/CI infrastructure that catches problems before they ship.
PHP & Backend Engineering
Complex, modern PHP systems that handle real business demands. Legacy modernisation, tech debt cleanup, scalable API design, and high-performance backend architecture. No design work.
Infrastructure & Automation
Ansible automation, Proxmox virtualisation, bare metal servers. Private cloud infrastructure preferred over public cloud.
Fractional CTO & Technical Leadership
Architecture ownership, technical roadmapping, code review culture and engineering standards, for teams that need a senior technical lead without a full-time hire.
Get In Touch
Got a project, a mess that needs cleaning up, or a team that could use an extra senior pair of hands? Get in touch.
Get In Touch