22 years of shipping the web. Still not extinct.

I started building websites in 2004, when layouts were made of tables, JavaScript was something you apologised for, and a surprising amount of the job was testing in a browser that no longer exists. I moved to standards-based CSS, then jQuery, then the first real PHP frameworks, then Laravel — and each time, the thing that mattered was not the tooling but whether the result could still be maintained after I left.

Somewhere in the middle of that I spent a stretch working outside the industry. It is the reason most of my back catalogue is offline: clients were acquired, businesses closed, domains lapsed, and nobody archives a trade portal. I can't hand you a list of live URLs. What I can do is show you exactly how each of those projects was reasoned about — which is the part that transfers anyway.

These days I work with Laravel and a deliberately small frontend stack. I take on new builds, rebuilds of things that have aged badly, and codebases somebody else abandoned. I am equally happy being the only developer or the one who gets a team unstuck.