Billie Thompson

I have been working with PHP since before 2010, though this is when my professional experience started. Typically I help companies develop additional microservices with Restful web interfaces, and give them advice on testing, deploying and maintaining them. As most companies have slightly different stacks I have had a reasonable amount of experience with most frameworks. I can also help you do more complicated things such as interoperate with queues, databases and caches, optimize your code by identifying the slowest parts using profilers, introduce a TDD and BDD approach to your development, and over advice about making your code reusable. Typically I work with Silex for smaller projects, although I have worked Slim previously. For larger projects I tend to use Symfony, however I have used ZF2, and Laravel

I have lead a team of developers developing a number of restful web services in Dropwizard. It was developed in a BDD and Agile style. Also some years ago now I help develop an application in Broadleaf (based on Spring MVC).

I have been in a number of projects with Node.JS components in them. Typically these exist in a middleware layer between APIs and the frontend. These normally use express I have also worked with using Node.JS to consume from queues perform work. There was also a talk I did about using Node.JS as a middleware layer between AngularJS and Silex that was at PHPUK 2015.

I have been working with git for more or less all my time in software development, I can show you how to re-order and edit commits, how to use git bisect to find the commit that broke something faster, how to sign tags and commits with your PGP key so you can validate who reviewed them.

I have developed search engines in PHP and ElasticSearch 3 times. This ranges from basic weighted searches including common document content (PDF, DOCX, and similar) to more complicated searches with support for type-ahead, and results influenced by user actions (such as page views). I also have experience creating a reusable RESTful interface for these sorts of search systems.

Typically I work with RabbitMQ, and AMQP from PHP or NodeJS, I have however worked with it from Java too. The work I have done with queues comes in three flavours. The first is the most common use-case which is to smooth request spikes and troughs by having things put into queues and processed when we have capacity. This could be capacity we can expand by throwing more hardware at a problem, but also capacity that is enforced by things like rate limiting. The next kind is implementation of circuit breaker patterns in order to prevent cascading network effects, or implement retries and failure handling in a generic way. The final kind I have implemented is a parallel processing system used for fraud detection which took into account things like frequency of actions in order to detect suspicious behaviours.

I also have experience working on the DevOps side of things. This experience includes (in order of oldest to newest) Vagrant, Puppet, Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes I have used Vagrant for many years and I am more than happy helping you get a Dev vagrant box setup. I also have experience working with configuration management systems such as Puppet and Ansible, and I have used them to create easily manageable server configurations. Most recently I have been working with Docker and Kubernetes to manage my servers and can show you how to host a multi-machine docker cluster using kubernetes cluster.