What I do
PHP / Symfony / Laravel
Testing
Writing and maintain tests that are run as part of the CI/CD pipeline to minimise issues in live environments.
AWS / DevOps
Docker
Version Control
Documentation / Scoping
Analysing requirements for new features and change requests and documenting these requirements for the team to be able to prioritise.
Latest Blog Posts
4 steps to improve Laravel + Docker performance issues
Improve the performance of your Laravel + Docker application by checking for DNS issues, installing PHP Opcache, configuring nginx to handle OPTIONS requests & installing docker-sync
Fixing "Authentication plugin 'caching_sha2_password' cannot be loaded" errors
As of MySQL 8.0, `caching_sha2_password` is now the default authentication plugin rather than `mysql_native_password` which was the default in previous versions. This means that clients (Sequel Pro, HeidiSQL etc) that rely on the `mysql_native_pa...
DV, OV and EV SSL certificates - What is the difference?
SSL Certificates come in a 3 types, Domain Validation (DV), Organisation Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV) but what is the difference and how do you distinguish between them?
Testimonials
Chris was an invaluable member of the team during his time at The Drum. He provided great technical leadership and worked incredibly hard to move the company's technical stack forward.
He also had a really broad experience which helped us with our general infrastructure and approach to analytics.
Christopher's skills with code, back-end infrastructure and basically every facet of digital product development are unrivalled.
There is simply nothing the man does not know about, and during our time at the Drum he helped give this lowly designer a peek behind the curtains on what really goes on within Docker containers, Apache server setups and PHP environments.
On top of everything he is friendly, approachable and eager to teach. A true gentleman.
Chris has been central to the success of the Herald & Times Group sites over the past two years. From a starting point in Jan 2013 when our servers were running at full capacity and couldn't handle more traffic, Chris implemented a number of changes that improved performance, increased reliability and more than doubled our server capacity without incurring any costs.
While Chris's core skills lie in PHP and MySQL, his wide-ranging skill set and capacity for learning has helped us in everything from Javascript coding to iPhone app development.
Featured Projects
Done Log - The to-do list alternative
Done Log is a productivity tool that records all the tasks you have completed instead of reminding you of all the tasks that are waiting for you.
DevObs
DevObs is a collection of development tools providing monitoring and notifications services to keep your website, api and services up and running. The tools within this collection are inspired by problems encountered regularly during day-to-day development.
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