Hi there! I’m Martin, a 30-something website developer living in the UK.
Originally from the sunny east coast of South Africa, I have over 17+ years of experience in website development.
At my core, I’m a skilled PHP back-end developer with a strong understanding of PHP – I have excellent knowledge in PHP frameworks like Laravel and Content Management Systems such as WordPress and Drupal, but it doesn’t stop there.
I started my career back in 2004 with a strong focus on Microsoft technologies such as ASP, ASP.net, IIS, Access databases and Visual Basic 6. Slowly, I upskilled myself in PHP and open source technologies and haven’t looked back since.
As a kid, I was always fascinated with computers – in my early teens, if I wasn’t tinkering with or gaming on my 386 (insert Doom, Sierra Quest games, Commander Keen nostalgia here), I was fascinated with DOS applications and started learning QBASIC and Turbo Pascal. By my mid-teens, I had discovered the magic of HTML and CSS (thanks to rocking Microsoft Frontpage 98 on my Intel Pentium II).
Straight out of school I knew what I wanted to do; programming. In 2004 I got a national certificate in Computer Science, landed my first job by the end of 2004 at a small GIS company and the rest was history.
Over the years, I have worked for many digital agencies once even ran my own company for a while (2008 – 2015).
When I’m not busy coding for a living, you’ll likely find me at home gaming, tinkering with tech, spending time with my wife & dogs or catching up on movies/series (also love anime).
// Open-Source Enthusiast
Open-source is very important to me and has been for a long time. I embrace and advocate the use of open-source technologies and software in both a professional and personal capacity.
The appeal of a collaborative community-driven effort, open standards, knowledge sharing amongst developers and not being dependent on enterprise software are just some of the reasons I find open-source so attractive.
From choosing to use open-source technologies like PHP, MariaDB and Laravel at work, to using open-source software such as Linux, Visual Studio Code, Firefox and VLC in a personal capacity. When given a choice, I’ll likely opt for an open-source solution.