Wizard of PHP Hi, I'm Isaac!
I have over 15 years of experience as a developer. I've developed and maintained hundreds of PHP sites across all major version of PHP from 3.x to 8.x.
My PHP experience is deep, including knowledge of internal PHP processes. I'm also very pragmatic: I know how to get a problem solved quickly, often very soon after first looking at a new piece of code that is causing another developer trouble.
My colleagues have consistently given me feedback that they appreciate my troubleshooting skills, so I decided that I'd like to share this with other developers who are using using PHP, ExpressionEngine, Craft CMS, Yii, CodeIgniter, and the myriad of other PHP frameworks and systems I have a lot of experience with and can pull apart quickly to get to the root of an issue.
Databases
I have extensive experience with MySQL, and also have Postgres experience in addition to many others. I've used just about every ORM for PHP that has been available over the years, and indeed written my own as well.
Legacy code
I really enjoy working on legacy code bases of all kinds as well as maintenance projects in general. One of long term interests has been how to gradually and steadily modernize a PHP or other legacy application without causing undo risk to the operation of the business that relies on it. I am very pragmatic in my approach, and follow the Strangler Fig pattern for this kind of work when possible. This and other parts of my pragmatic approach allow me to safely make incremental improvements.
Performance issues and hosting
As a consultant, I maintained a major national nonprofit website on the AWS cloud platform for more than 6 years, after rewriting it from scratch from Drupal to Craft CMS (also a PHP platform), without any visible impact to the design or functionality. I then lead a small team of developers that gradually added additional features to the site.
I also have experience with multiple PaaS and PaaS-like systems including Heroku, HasiSuite, Azure, DigitalOcean, Flynn, and CapRover amongst others. My largest sites have successfully run with millions of visitors per month for several years without any performance issues, including mitigation of several scraping and denial of service attacks.
I also have extensive experience running PHP in a distributed and high availability environment, with popular cloud providers and on bare metal. My PHP+DevOps experience includes setting up CI/CD pipelines -- something not everyone wants to do but everyone knows they need someone to do.
Additional experience
Additionally I have extensive experience in C# and Python, which helps me to see things is a broader way and not get stuck in "the way we do it" just for the sake of it.
I have been a full-time contractor for the last 10 years, running my own business with periodic assistance from other developers as needed on a subcontractor basis.
Let me know how I can help you solve your PHP problems!
Happy coding!