Hey, I'm Aaron
I’m a full stack web developer, based in the UK.
Over the last 14 years, I’ve worked with a number of frameworks, libraries and tools - in teams of various sizes - wearing different hats.
I write SOLID, reusable, decoupled and testable code. I’m obsessed with learning new things and able to pick up new languages, abilities, patterns, principles and styles very quickly and easily.
I am currently enjoying building single-page applications with Laravel, Vue and Tailwind.
I’m a backend developer
Working in a lead position for most of my 14 year career, I’ve built up a good, solid working knowledge of object-oriented PHP. Since 2012, I’ve primarily worked with Laravel, but I have used other frameworks such as Symfony, CodeIgniter, Slim and Silex.
I follow best practices, including; compliance with the PSR-2 coding standard, adhering to SOLID principles, leverage Dependency Injection and Service layers patterns.
My main strengths regarding the backend include:
- Quickly understanding and suggesting business logic
- Database design and optimisation
- RESTful API design
- Project architecture
I’ll always try to use the best technology or service available for the task in hand. As such, I’ve used lots, such as: Stripe, Redis, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Docker, Mailgun, Node, Pusher and Websockets.
I’m a frontend developer
Since the start of my career, I’ve had a special affinity with frontend frameworks. I always felt like they were the future of the web.
From the early days of Backbone to Vue 3 we have today, I’ve been writing fast, scaleable, single page applications for years.
I have an eye for detail, and that’s reflected in the HTML & CSS I write. It’s clean, semantic, responsive and always closely matches the designs.
My main strengths regarding the frontend include:
- Server Side Rendering experience
- Fast at writing design accurate HTML & CSS
- Eye for UX & design
I’m experienced
The proof is in the pudding. Here are some of the projects I’ve worked on:
Rentora
Rentora is a property management and rent collection tool for landlords and tenants.
I worked on Rentora from its inception. I helped define the business, wireframed and designed the UI before spending almost 2 years building it - mostly solo, but I did hire and manage a handful developers to assist with the workload at points.
The front end is a Vue single page app, styled with Tailwind. The backend is a Laravel application that provides data to the frontend via a RESTful API.
I built bespoke systems for messaging, file storage, property management and rent collection (including payments and payouts via Stripe).
Ask Hilti
Hilti tasked a small team of internal developers with building Ask Hilti - an education and community portal for their engineers.
I joined shortly after development had started, but quickly got up to speed. Before long I was working closely with the project manager, and along side their lead developer on the more complex areas of the site.
Amongst other things, we built an on-demand video and live seminar system in Angular, with a Laravel backend.
Fast? Yes. Thorough & high quality? Yes. Efficient code? Yes. Amazing analytical skills? Yes. Vegetarian? No. but learning a new framework in record time? Yes. - Would hire him again in a split second.
Tim Freudenstein, Global Digital Manager @ Hilti
80/20 MyBusiness
80/20 MyBusiness is one of the more interesting projects I’ve worked on.
This online statistical analysis tool, based on the pareto principle, provide evidence and advice aimed towards improving business performance - all you do is upload a spreadsheet of sales data and kick back while the algorithm crunches the numbers.
I worked closely with LYD through prototyping, testing, building and eventually roll out to create this first version of the product.
I have always found him to be an exceptional developer, with an ability to not only understand projects, but to integrate every aspect of them, challenging and contributing in a manner that makes him an a highly valued individual.
Lawrence Evarard, Design Principal @ Little Yellow Duck
Tutorful
Tutorful connects students looking for private tuition with talented and trusted tutors.
Focusing on ease of use for both student and tutor, the website features bespoke search, messaging, booking, payment and review systems.
When we reached out to Aaron asking for help to build our website, I never could have imagined what a great decision that would turn out to be. We’ve worked with Aaron for almost a year, on a large, complicated project, and Aaron has handled it from start to finish with great skill.
Mark Hughes, Co-founder @ Tutorful
Keystrok.es
Touch typing is amazing. I made keystrokes.io to teach it to the masses, in a fun way.
This was the first large personal project I started, written in Backbone.js, with a custom Node.js backend, users could learn how to type on their own, or join a race and be matched with users across the world.
Laroute
Laravel has some pretty sweet helper functions for generating urls/links and its auto-json-magic makes it building APIs super easy. It’s the go-to choice for building single-page js apps for me and many others, but routing can quickly become a bit of a pain.
This package allows you to port your routes over to JavaScript, and gives us a bunch of very familiar helper functions to use.
Generate Laravel route URLs from JavaScript… neat little package
Taylor Otwell, Founder & CEO @ Laravel
Cookit
Cookit and LYD tasked me with building a web app with an ambitious goal. They wanted to simplify cooking and shopping, while cutting down on waste.
Cookit creates meal plans for you that minimize waste. A simple example would be: if one recipe uses half a pack of chicken, it will attempt to use the other half in another meal that same week.
Digging a little deeper: Cookit will also remember if you have non-perishable items from a previous purchase, choose wisely from mutliple pack sizes (a pack of 2 or 4 chicken breasts) and even choose between premium and budget food options.
You then simply purchase your meal plan. Cookit will ship you the ingredients and recipes.
I truly believe Aaron’s love for programming keeps him extremely motivated in solving technical challenges and his technical ability evolving continuously; he just aims to always be better, better, better - that is exactly what you want when building a business.
Juliana Zarate Davila, Co-founder @ Cookit
I’m a human
Outside of coding, I go bouldering and race motorbikes.