LegitPHP

I've been building software since I was a teenager. It's what I do for fun and a living. I've also helped build and run an industry leading creative company in an unrelated industry where I learned how to interface with clients, iterate the product based on their needs and ultimately become a trendsetter. This has put me in an interesting place of having experience on many different sides of business, I know how to listen to what a client needs and translate that into intuitive software.

I also have an extensive history in black/greyhat SEO and automation of web-related things. I'm always looking for new and fun projects involving automation, scraping and the scripting of web-services. (account creation, lead gathering, e-commerce product collection, price comparisons, etc)

Full Stack Development

I've been working with PHP for over 8 years now. Over the last couple years I've been working with Laravel 4 & 5 for most projects. I have experience building a very wide range of applications, from a website-builder running > 400k websites from the same codebase/database with hundreds of millions of records to automating account creation, ordering and check-out through various e-commerce platforms on the level of thousands of purchases/accounts. Content creation, scraping, data extraction/normalization/organization. I designed, built and sold access to a search engine search API that worked in real time, allowing synchronous scraping of search results from up to 8 search engines.

Workflow Consultation

Over the years of working with contracting clients to develop software for their businesses I've also found that I end up doing quite a bit of consulting on non-software specific aspects of their businesses. Many times I've been able to simplify workflows and personel processes withing their company due to my exposure to them in the process of researching the software I've been contracted to write.

Automation

Through various projects I have extensive experience automating various processes ranging from sending emails to creating and interacting with accounts on web services.

SEO

My initial introduction to the web world was through affiliate marketing, more specifically... I built thousands and thousands of cloaking websites to redirect traffic to my affiliate offers. I was able to test various on-page and off-page SEO strategies across thousands of domains with real google search traffic to find what worked best in each scenario. Basic on-page optimizations are second nature, and I build projects with SEO best practices from the start.

Buzzwords

I have experience and am comfortable with the following technologies...

Things I'd love a reason to learn...

(I learn quickly, especially if I'm able to put the new technology in context with real-life models/requirements)

Interests

I'm an avid sports fan, mainly baseball and basketball. I've played baseball of one sort or another since I was 6 years old (still play) and am fiercly competitive. I feel my experience in the sports world has been a great benefit in my business and personal life... from the early and often exposure to failure and high pressure situations to the lessons learned about what it takes and what you can do when you push yourself.

I'm also a huge nature lover. I've recently (within the last 6 years or so) picked up a fascination with wilderness backpacking. (thus the lwhiker.com site) I've learned through backpacking that forcing yourself away from a computer and constant stimulation really allows you to think more deeply. Walking for hours and hours a day is a great way to really hash out a new large project and it's intricacies.

Prior to my software career I was a professional photographer, focusing on horse show (event) photography. Together with my father we spent 10 years at the top of our industry - I learned quite a bit about business, people, photography and sales. It was during this career that I really was able to hone my software development skills by working on various projects for the company as well as myself.