I’m a full stack developer currently living in Seattle. I’ve been building things for the web since 2014 primarily in the ecommerce space.

What I do

My day-to-day work is concentrated on Shopify and Magento with some Laravel projects thrown in, as well as the long tail of things that come with agency work: a marketing site, a build pipeline nobody wanted to own, an email design that has to look right in Outlook.

The part I’ve come to care most about is the boring, durable stuff more so than any particular platform: whether the next developer can understand the intent behind my code, whether the thing still builds in three years, whether the client can get at their own domain without asking me. I’ve written more about that than about any framework, which was not the original plan and is probably the honest summary of what I’ve learned.

These days I do a fair amount that isn’t typing, including scoping, estimating, talking to clients directly, making sure the person two years behind me has something better than I had. That shift crept up on me and I’m still working out what I think about it.

What this is

Two kinds of writing:

Craft is the short, useful kind: a property that turned out to do more than I expected, a thing I got wrong in a way that seems worth passing on. Culture, Philosophy and Policy are the longer, slower kind about how this work actually goes: estimates, handovers, what happens to juniors, who gets to say no.

How I got here

I taught myself through 2014 by way of video courses and other people’s projects. I did some freelance work at the time, but my first true dev job was in 2015 at a WordPress shop that specialized in brochure sites for doctors, dentists, and plastic surgeons.

From 2016, I spent five years at an agency doing proper ecommerce work: Magento at first, then increasingly Shopify. That’s where I picked up PHP more or less by accident and learned that the interesting problems in this job are usually not the ones in the ticket.

I left in 2021 to go in-house; that did not last very long but it nevertheless taught me some things about how agencies work that the previous five years hadn’t. I’ve been back in the agency life since 2022, where I’ve been since and where I turned into whatever kind of webdev I am now.

Say hello

If something here was useful or even if it was just straight-up inaccurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Email is the best way of contacting me.