Senior Software Engineer on the Gravity Portals product team

Senior Engineer

My experience with PHP over a decade and a half spans at least a half dozen of the top PHP frameworks, and also a few framework-less or from scratch projects, too. The majority of my experience in recent years is with Drupal and Laravel web applications and some command line utilities.

I've built or rebuilt several web applications leveraging Laravel. In all instances, I also am completing the setup of the entire project lifecycle support systems and infrastructure: source code management, architecture, roadmaps and task tracking, bug reporting, continuous delivery, and hosting, DNS, security, and so on and so forth.

I either know how to do it well, or I know how to figure it out :)

Htmx (and hyperscript) is the refreshingly sane and simple alternative to the javascript framework swamp of recent years. I appreciate Javascript very much, and have worked with it successfully for nearly two decades. However I'm not alone in recognizing that frameworks such as reactjs and vue.js are far too heavily pushed on new devs and web projects. Everything old is new again, and as a community, we can do better. Ask me how htmx can benefit your project or work.

"Semantics" was a concept that instantly clicked with me, from my earliest days learning and working with html and those unwieldy cascading style sheets. TopStyle, an authoring tool by Nick Bradbury, taught me the ins and outs of CSS.

I love these technologies together, they offer a lot of power, but I'll be the first to confess that fine design and layouts never got to be one of my strengths... I've said this another way... that I am a much better student of the /science/ of css, than the art of css.

$ npm i emjayess

I took to Javascript right away; I landed a contract gig in 2005, and a few weeks in it became clear that the other engineers didn't care for it much, but someone had to do it... so I did it. I became the resident expert. It was a period during which we adopted prototype & scriptaculous. I had an affinity for the dojo toolkit.

I was a late-adopter to jQuery - I thought it was the trendy framework that would come and go, and prototype would outlast it. Then I began using it and forgot about prototype :)

Obviously the scene has exploded in the past 5 years, and like most of us, I'm trying my best to keep up!

I've gained experience with Vuejs in web applications of varying degrees of complexity and with a couple of different back-end setups, including Laravel-powered JSON web api's (REST and GraphQL styles), Nuxtjs, public API's, and API's backed by cloud functions (aka serverless).

I'm comfortable working on applications having just a few Vuejs enhancements or plugins, on up to front-ends built entirely with Vue and web components.

Personal details

Matthew S.

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