👋 Hello Packagist Conductors

Great to meet you!

I'm Steven, an enthusiastic software developer with a great passion for PHP. I’ve been making myself useful to software teams large and small for many years. I help them build, maintain and grow their SaaS businesses.

I currently live in Leuven, Belgium, just a stone's throw away from Berlin 😉.

📙 My Story So Far

I started out at a tiny, local IT services company in Belgium as junior developer. After that, I started as an independent freelancer and worked remotely ever since.

I worked very closely with my friends at Joomlatools for many years. This company lived and breathed the open-source philosophy. We published many tools and tricks to help modernise Joomla development, and organised regular mini-conferences called Nooku Jams.

I created and maintained the Joomlatools Composer plugin to install Joomla extensions via CLI, the Joomlatools Vagrant development box and the first Joomla CLI tool, on top of symfony/console.

In 2017 I co-founded a SaaS app, Goolash, that automates license billing for IT companies. Lots of ups and downs on this ride. We were acquired by Zomentum in 2021. I built an engineering team there to scale up and eventually created their new Payments product too.

I’m currently still working with Zomentum and was not yet actively searching for another opportunity. However when I saw this job posting I had to apply, since this sounds like an awesome job – and to be honest, I really miss working closely with fellow open source enthusiasts and community-minded PHP developers.

🛠️ Software development skills

Most production-grade work I’ve done over the years has been in PHP and MySQL, and it’s fair to say I’m a PHP specialist. The past 4 – 5 years I’ve worked almost exclusively on apps built on top of Laravel Framework, with a lot of focus on REST APIs and webhook wrangling.

That doesn’t mean I shy away from anything else – I’ve built a small API on top of R for a startup once, created Java desktop applications at the start of my career, and helped to protoype a surveyor application using the Geospatial Functions in PostgreSQL, amongst other things.

I always look for the right tool for the job, but I can’t deny that I absolutely love PHP ❤️

The fact that I always aim to write clean, maintainable and tested code is a given. PHPStan and PHPUnit are the first two dependencies in every project's composer.json.

🚀 Keeping Things Running

I’ve done extensive infrastructure work with Linux servers, maintaining and extending hosting infrastructure, strace’ing PHP background processes to figure out what keeps 🤬 killing them (SoapClient did it), and generally keeping things running with the best performance possible.

I love Docker, mostly to share a local development environment with the team, and for use in CI pipelines. At my current job, we also run them in production.

For years I wasn't sure whether to mirror Git and Apt repositories, or start backing up everything in my own repositories. I love it that Private Packagist solves this problem for PHP development now.

I worked a lot with Puppet and Ansible over the years, and I’m always in favour of describing your desired infrastructure state via configuration files.

👨‍💻 My approach to Building Software

I’ve learned over the years that code is only a means to an end. What matters is the business, its goals and the value we bring to the customer.

I’m a very much in favour of Support Driven Development, which you also refer to in your job application. I’d much rather spend some time talking to customers first than to build the wrong solution.

Before we do get to the good stuff – writing code -, I try to have most of the work done already. Get consensus from the team on the approach, figure out what changes we’ll make and make sure that potential risks to existing functionality are identified.

The work doesn’t stop when the feature is deployed either. I want to make sure the feature reaches its intended goal.

"You build it, you run it" 🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️

💪 Leading/Coaching/Training/Managing Teams

I’ve experienced both the satisfaction and frustration of recruiting, onboarding, coaching and leading a team of engineers. It’s been a rewarding experience but I also had to learn many lessons the hard way.

The default modus operandi I've seen in many companies is to have each individual work on separate tasks, siloed off from the rest of the team and the business. I’m convinced that this is not the way to build great software.

I’m a big fan of regular pair programming sessions, even mob programming sessions. Most particularly as a way to share knowledge and experience with junior engineers quickly.

As a team lead and/or mentor, I aim to improve trust between all members, so that everyone knows it’s safe to voice a different opinion or make a mistake.

I encourage everyone to communicate on what they’re doing as much as possible, which is especially important in a remote team. A great team proactively shares what they’re working on, without being chased for updates.

I keep gaining new insights in this function, mostly about my own shortcomings, biases and challenges. My ideas and approaches will surely evolve even more over the coming years.

📝 Final Thoughts

There are a lot of I’s and my’s on this page, so enough about me. 🙊 I’d love to learn more about Packagist Conductors, the members of your team and your plans for the future.

I'm convinced that my experience aligns perfectly with the profile you are looking for, and I’m curious to find out if I can help you reach your goals. I'm super excited about contributing to further professionalising the PHP ecosystem through Private Packagist 💪

I hope I already convinced you enough to start a conversation, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
Steven