Senior Developer

At E-Cigarette Direct I moved from keeping an ageing Magento estate alive to designing and building the bespoke platform that replaced it, and helped the business scale through a period of extraordinary growth.

A bespoke commerce platform

I designed and built a custom e-commerce platform on Symfony components and PHP 7.4 (through to 8+), with Vue.js and Twig on the front-end and MySQL, Redis and RabbitMQ behind it, hosted on IONOS Cloud. I owned solutions from architecture through to implementation, and planned and oversaw continual upgrades to manage technical debt and reduce long-term risk.

Modernising and sunsetting the legacy

In parallel I maintained and ultimately sunset the legacy Magento 1.9 platform. Patching and performance tuning cut page-load times by 55–90%, a direct win for user experience, conversion and search ranking.

Scaling through 430% growth

When the pandemic drove a 430% increase in web sales, I helped design and implement the business workflows that let services scale without sacrificing reliability or response times.

Integrations

I designed and maintained the platform’s external integrations: payment gateways, KYC and age-verification providers, and email-marketing platforms, including bidirectional data syncing between systems.

Engineering practices

I architected and codified infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform, implemented CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, and standardised the development environment using Docker for consistent local and test setups. I embedded testing into delivery with Jest and PHPUnit, and recruited, trained and mentored new developers, performing code reviews and lifting code quality across the team.