Laravel Application Developer, Peter Fox
I am a PHP developer of over 14 years and a Laravel developer of 7 years. I’ve worked in the trade insurance, property market and recruitment sectors.
Over time I’ve found myself preferring Laravel and have gone on to make somewhat popular Laravel packages. My most popular one having 500 Stars on Github and over 700K downloads. I’ve also got a handful of articles on available to the public, which have been well-received.
Work Experience
2021 - Present
Senior Software @ Amiqus
During the Covid pandemic I had to find new work and was lucky enough to join Amiqus, a company focused on ID verification. I have had to take on several duties, including being the engineering lead on several projects and engineering manager for two other employees. One such project was building an integration created by and for the NHS to process checks against medical registers.
The majority of the work has been working with Laravel and Vue.js. While at Amiqus I’ve also pushed to integrate more tools to improve our continuous integration processes and rely less on Git to hold back features.
2019 - 2020
Lead Software Engineer @ Trade Cover Exchange
I joined Trade Cover Exchange as the lead developer working remotely on a brand-new start-up. Upon joining, I was very unaware of the trade credit insurance world. We built a single-page application from scratch using Laravel and Vue.js. The app was built to be serverless and run on Google’s Cloud Platform, which required customisation to the Laravel framework to use the cloud platform’s services fully. One such customisation was to make a Queue driver for Google Cloud Tasks.
2018 - 2019
Software Developer @ Property Logic Ltd.
In 2018 I came on board Property Logic to bring new skills to a team with a lot of legacy debt. Property Logic as a company, sells digital and print services to estate agents across the UK as part of the eProp group. While there, I helped the team learn how to do continuous integration using Travis CI and helped write scripts to automate QA testing production.
Projects
PHP Rector
Contributor - Rector PHP Github
Often when working on Rector rules for Laravel it has made sense to contribute as well to the rules in the main Rector repository as well as contribute to other official repositories, like PHPUnit.
Laravel Rector
Maintainer - Rector Laravel Github
I've spent a lot of time manually upgrading Laravel Projects and finding it frustrating. I learnt of Rector and decided to get involved in creating my own upgrade rules. From there I've made enough to end up being invited to become a maintainer.
CockroachDB Driver for Laravel
Owner - YLS Ideas CockroachDB driver for Laravel
At the end of 2021 I started another open source project which has been my most challenging. It's a Database driver for CockroachDB to be compatible with the CockroachDB Serverless service.
Feature Flags for Laravel
Owner - YLS Ideas Feature Flags
I've experienced a number of issues during my career where Feature Flags could have resolved the problem. This was the driving force for me to create my own package. In later years Laravel Pennant was created and as such demand for the package has declined but I am very proud of it's overall success.
Education
2016 - 2017
Software Development M.SC @ University of Hertfordshire
In 2016 I went back to university to improve my education and try my hand at other fields, such as cyber security and data mining, while still focusing on software development.
2008 - 2011
Computer Science B.SC @ University of Hertfordshire
I started my course in 2008 and completed it in 2011 with a 2:1. I studied web design, computer networking, programming and a small amount of artificial intelligence.