About Joseph

My Journey

I started my career working in an ecommerce business back when ecommerce was still in its infancy. In those early days, there simply weren't off-the-shelf solutions that could handle the scale and complexity we needed. I basically had to learn to program in order to create the vital business systems that would allow us to cope with our sales volume.

What began as necessity turned into passion. I discovered that I actually quite liked development, so I made the decision to focus on really learning it properly. After mastering the fundamentals and gaining substantial experience, I went freelance. That was a long time ago now.

I've definitely paid my dues in terms of 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" was my way of ensuring that was the case—the best way to learn is to teach, they say.

Today, I help businesses with large-scale, high-turnover, high-complexity PHP applications. I wrangle legacy PHP codebases, manage massive tech debt, and work in high-pressure environments where performance and reliability are critical.

Philosophy

I believe in writing clean, maintainable code that stands the test of time. Every solution should be scalable, secure, and simple to understand. Technology should serve the business, not complicate it.

Expertise Areas