Twenty years of PHP, pointed at systems that cannot go down.

I started with PHP 4, on shared hosting, in an era when deployment meant FTP and hope. Everything since has been a slow lesson in what actually keeps systems alive: boring releases, honest logging, and knowing which failure modes you have chosen to accept.

Today I am Technical Lead at Deploy Ecommerce, working across Adobe Commerce, Magento and Laravel. My week splits between keeping stores trading, connecting them to the ERP, warehouse and third-party systems that run the business behind the storefront, and building internal tools that take manual process off people who have better things to do.

The work I get called for most is diagnosis. When a fault crosses system boundaries, when two vendors each insist the problem is at the other end, when it cannot be reproduced on staging, that is usually when the phone rings. I work the same way every time: gather evidence before forming a theory, rank the competing explanations, then prove one of them wrong.

I also write and publish open source, contribute to Magento core and answer more questions than I ask in the Adobe Commerce, Mage-OS and wider PHP communities. Most of what I release started life as something a merchant needed on a Tuesday.