This page has information about my work as a software developer and different bits of open source software I've written and made available for others to use and improve.
I blog about tech and software over at tech.chrishardie.com. You can read about my approach to building software. Here's my GitHub profile.
Laravel
I have been developing Laravel applications for several years now, ranging from Software-as-a-Service to public news/information websites, command line applications to internal information processing tools. I blog about Laravel tips and best practices, and have submitted a variety of issues, documentation improvements and pull requests to popular Laravel tools. I've also attended a number of Laravel-focused and related events, most recently Laracon Winter 2021.
Here are my standard Laravel development tools.
Whenever possible in developing a Laravel application, I try to create re-usable packages that are self-contained in their functionality and that may be helpful to others. Here are a few of those:
- CrowdTangle API SDK — A minimal PHP implementation of the CrowdTangle API
- Laravel Feedmaker — Laravel package to enable crawling/parsing HTML pages and generating corresponding RSS feeds
- Laravel Calendar Crawler — Laravel package to enable crawling web pages for event data, generating corresponding ICS feeds
Other Laravel related tools:
- My Packer templates for deploying Laravel applications to Digital Ocean
- A simple Bash script to deploy Laravel apps from a git repo
WordPress
As you'll see from my WordPress.org profile, I've contributed to WordPress core, developed plugins, assisted other WordPress users in the community forums, and both spoken at and helped organize various WordCamps.
I contributed significantly to the set of WP CLI tools collectively called WordPress Import Fixers, which help with the migration and cleanup of content between two WordPress systems or from non-WordPress systems into WordPress.
I published tools for migrating photo collections from Flickr to WordPress.
I've installed, configured, secured and optimized hundreds - maybe thousands - of WordPress sites in my time. I sometimes write about WordPress tips and tricks on my blog.
I've made small contributions to various related projects like VVV, Jetpack, the code powering WordPress.com, other people's WordPress plugins, the Largo framework, the bones starter WordPress theme, and the (deprecated) VIP Quickstart development environment.
From 2020 to 2022, I built, launched and grew a WordPress-focused software-as-a-service application called WP Lookout.
WordPress Plugins
I've written a few simple WordPress plugins and have more in progress:
Not published in the WordPress.org plugin repository is a simple plugin that allows you to test Jetpack's Related Posts feature without being connected to the Internet.
In addition to these I've contributed to Mailchimp for WooCommerce, Keyring Social Importers and Simple New Post Emails.
Other Software
- imail2vpopmail: a Perl script to ease the transition from the Windows IMail server to qmail and vpopmail
- My DB_Browser software is no longer available, but was highlighted in the 2001 O'Reilly book Oracle and Open Source
Over the course of my professional life I've also written a fair amount of software whose source code is not published, either for client projects, internal tools or proprietary systems. And then there's all the system administration scripts and automations I've created over the years that were perfect for one particular situation but almost certainly entirely useless to everyone else.
Tools
These are some of the tools I've come to be proficient with in my technical work: