Alex C

Rising Codementor

US$50.00

For every 15 mins

ABOUT ME

CTO-Level Open Source Architect: High-Availability PHP, Audio/Video Specialist

15 years' experience in advanced open-source software PHP development, with specific emphasis on long-term architecture, security, and high-availability scaling. CTO-level skills and experience with startups, as well as teams of 400+ devs for major international brands.

Example projects: OAuth2 APIs, CDNs (S3/Rackspace etc), e-commerce processing (Stripe, Braintree), queueing (Redis, Beanstalkd, AMQP etc), NoSQL & graph databases (Neo4j), dynamic PDF generation, image creation/manipulation (Instagram-style filters etc), video encoding/streaming (Wowza, Red), server data encryption, Cloud/server setup with services (cron, backups, supervisor), client email management (Mandrill, Mailgun), multi-lingual UI apps. And plenty more.

Typically find myself on the phone to clients who a) have projects their devs are struggling with because of complexity, bI need something resolved fast at low-cost, and c) are using unusual technologies (WebGL, HLS video streaming, IoT/mobile device integration, AES encryption etc).

Very friendly and personable British guy with a lot more interests than tapping keys in a cupboard wearing a heavy metal t-shirt. Traveled to more than 50 countries and worked with clients from all over the world.

English

Eastern Time (US & Canada) (-04:00)

Joined May 2016

EXPERTISE

PHP

15 years experience

15 years experience in building enterprise-scale web apps from the old (sad) days of PHP4 to the newer PHP7. Plus a lot of leftfield stuf...

15 years experience in building enterprise-scale web apps from the old (sad) days of PHP4 to the newer PHP7. Plus a lot of leftfield stuff - connecting with Win32 via COM, building C extensions, audio/video converting with FFMEG. Only use Laravel these days as it's the most useful framework out there.

Symfony 2 Laravel 4 Laravel 5 Symfony CodeIgniter Laravel PHP PHP 7

SQL

15 years experience

Learn it for one, learn it for all. Mainly in favor of NoSQL and graph databases these days, but i know my JOIN from my COALESCE to my GI...

Learn it for one, learn it for all. Mainly in favor of NoSQL and graph databases these days, but i know my JOIN from my COALESCE to my GIS queries like ST_WITHIN.

Microsoft SQL Server SQL MySQL

Microsoft SQL Server SQL MySQL PostgreSQL Spatial query

MySQL

14 years experience

14+ years of deploying and optimising MySQL in production environments, designed to handle 10-15M rows, as well as more complex storage l...

14+ years of deploying and optimising MySQL in production environments, designed to handle 10-15M rows, as well as more complex storage like GEOMETRY field types and replication/indexing for higher performance.

MySQL MySQL Optimization MySQL Administration

MySQL MySQL Optimization MySQL Administration Mysql replication MySQLi

Server

12 years experience

Regularly set up dual development/production boxes on platforms like EC2, DigitalOcean, Google App Engine, SoftLayer, etc. Used to deali...

Regularly set up dual development/production boxes on platforms like EC2, DigitalOcean, Google App Engine, SoftLayer, etc. Used to dealing with cron, S3 backups, shell scripting, security hardening, and making my way around building custom libraries and upgrade scheduling.

Linux System Administration CentOS Ubuntu

Linux System Administration CentOS Ubuntu Solaris SSH SFTP FTP

Nginx

8 years experience

What's not to love about nginx? Easy configuration syntax, super-fast response times, and all so configurable. Password protection, SPDY/...

What's not to love about nginx? Easy configuration syntax, super-fast response times, and all so configurable. Password protection, SPDY/HTTP2 config, reverse proxying to localhost all no problem. I build my own Lua modules for it now.

Web Servers Apache HTTP Server TLS

Web Servers Apache HTTP Server TLS Nginx Nginx 1.6 Spdy SSL Security

FFmpeg

8 years experience

I've used FFMPEG from my earliest days working in TV and broadcast environments, before it split schizophrenically into libavcodec. Tweak...

I've used FFMPEG from my earliest days working in TV and broadcast environments, before it split schizophrenically into libavcodec. Tweaking it to get the results you want is the hardest part, as well as queueing encodes when integrating with PHP/python. The newer x265 stuff is very interesting.

FFmpeg Video Encoding Video Processing

FFmpeg Video Encoding Video Processing Gstreamer

Video streaming

10 years experience

The first video server i used was RealServer 8 - now that was a long time ago (back when it was also multicast). Nowadays there's only on...

The first video server i used was RealServer 8 - now that was a long time ago (back when it was also multicast). Nowadays there's only one real choice - Wowza on EC2. It used to be RTSP, then it was RTMP, MPEG-DASH, and now HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). With Amazon's infrastructure, it's fairly easy to do in most scenarios.

Wowza Streaming Engine Video streaming Live Streaming

Wowza Streaming Engine Video streaming Live Streaming Rtsp Rtmp

REVIEWS FROM CLIENTS

Alex's profile has been carefully vetted and approved as a Codementor. Connect with Alex now, and leave a review for them once you're done!