I've worked with PHP since school and all of my professional life, sometimes with frameworks (Symfony, Slim, Silex, ZF2, Drupal, WordPress), but mostly without and in big, "historically grown" legacy systems. They don't scare me anymore, and I had the opportunity multiple times to assist in making them more maintainable by modularizing, Composer-izing, adding tests or even carefully replacing parts of them with a microservices architecture.

Contributing to systems with both low-latency requirements as well as PHP-based batch jobs that ran for hours and required tens of GB of RAM, I know how to make PHP code run in a fast and stable way. But I've also designed and developed RESTful API servers and clients or MVC-based applications.

I have compiled PHP from source, set up (and debugged!) Apache and nginx, helped out our ops engineer on randomly crashing processes using strace, gdb and core dumps and generally know a lot more about the language and its internals than just "how to create a website".

My specialties are fixing encoding issues (I can convert to and from UTF-8 using pen and paper 😉), regular expressions and sorting out problems with Composer.

Personal details

Tim W.

Summary

Technical skills