Freelance Full-Stack Developer in Bath & Bristol | Laravel Expert

IdencyTime is a multi-tenant time and attendance management system built with Laravel and Filament. The system manages staff clock in/out records from biometric devices and integrates with HR systems including PeopleHR, SageHR, and CezanneHR.

As the development lead on the project, I'm responsible for the overall architecture, development, and maintenance of the system, and I'm also involved in decision-making and planning on the product's direction.

Key features include multiple devices/device vendors, real-time device synchronization, automated clock registration and staff matching, multi-timezone support, evacuation reporting for safety compliance, and comprehensive admin panel built with Filament for managing customers, staff, devices, locations, and departments.

The system is built with Laravel, uses Filament for the admin interface, uses Laravel Horizon queues, and has high levels of test coverage with PHPUnit and meets PHPStan level 8 static analysis.

From You To Me are a personalised gift company ("Making Gifts Matter")—journals, keepsake books, meaningful gifts.

I built and maintain an internal Laravel sync platform that keeps orders and invoices flowing between their ecommerce channels (Magento, Amazon Vendor Central, Faire), accounting (Zoho Books), and warehouse (Mintsoft)—including syncing orders to the warehouse and tracking back to Zoho. The system also handles supplier invoice uploads and uses Laravel Horizon for queues, Livewire for internal UI, and Slack for alerts.

The project is process automation and integration at its core: the right data in the right place without manual handoffs, built with Laravel, Horizon, and Livewire.

Two projects for the same startup:

• The Headteacher's report provides reporting services to headteachers and the wider school management to help them meet their obligations to their governors, education authorities, and parents.
• mySchoolWellbeing provides digital services to help schools discover, track and drive improvement to the wellbeing of staff, parents, and pupils.

The Headteacher's report is a Symfony system that automates the production of reports based on data drawn from publicly available datasets issued by the Department for Education alongside data from schools' own MIS systems. This is a computationally intensive task - so a key challenge is to manage costs whilst still providing fast turnaround. This is achieved with workload prioritisation and infrastructure scaling using EC2 instances supported by containerised services to provide near-instant 'burstable' capacity. I am also responsible for the web portal used day to day by customers - features include access to the reports, subscription management, and configuration of certain aspects of the reports.

At its heart, mySchoolWellbeing is a surveying tool built with Laravel that allows schools to periodically collect a dataset from each group (staff, parents, pupils) of stakeholders. This data is then used to monitor and track wellbeing within the school through a data portal comprising customised reports and charting. As with the Headteacher's report, there is again a heavy dependency on data being drawn in from dfe datasets and schools' own systems.

Applied Change are a data led change management consultancy, the Change Journey Navigator is an online software product to help deliver this service.

Built with Laravel, the project is in essence a startup—I am responsible for the entirety of the system, from design and development to server infrastructure and day-to-day operation. The system centres around a tool for asking stakeholders a curated set of questions. Behind the scenes these are all carefully grouped and categorised which allows analysis of the results against the Applied Change Model. The results of the survey are delivered through a reporting 'dashboard' that allows Applied Change to analyse the results in real time, including the ability to dig into and compare data across different aspects of the 'model' as well as between locations, business groups and time periods. This in turn helps businesses to understand what is and is not working and why, ultimately enabling them to drive change. The cycle can then be repeated to track progress and measure the impact of the change.

The product is multi tenant - Applied Change use it, but they also provide the software to other change practioners to use with their clients; consequently it is multi-tenanted with all that goes with that - for example user management, account levels, billing, and security.

I lead the development team responsible for developing and maintaining the Symfony-based software used by this multi-national online visa application service.

A key component is a decision engine that recommends the most appropriate visa for your trip based on facts such as where you are going, how long for, and what for - from over 10,000 configured products. This ties in with a multi-channel ecommerce system that allows The Visa Machine and over 100 partners/resellers to sell products, each with a customisable product range and pricing alongside differing commercial arrangements.

I also deliver the backend system used by staff across four global offices to administer procurement and delivery of visas and management of the product catalogue.

Legacy management is a key component on this project as well. I regularly review/assess the state of the system, flagging where I need to make upgrades for security or operational reasons. I also identify and make recommendations when other opportunities to make upgrades arise and are commercially sensible.

I’m also responsible for all server infrastructure and devops processes.

I provide outsource development support to a number of agencies, usually taking on specific projects outside the in-house skillset or capacity. I have occasionally filled in as a part time lead developer (I was previously a full time lead within a digital agency) providing support and consultancy to in-house development teams.

Projects have been all shapes and sizes - including ecommerce, management systems, WordPress plugins, security audits, performance consultancy, server migrations, and mobile applications.

End clients have included British American Tobacco, Currys PC World, Diageo, Lindt, Nestle, Liverpool FC and Oxford University.

I take on smaller/ad-hoc development tasks to address specific problems businesses have - loosely within the realm of process automation.

Examples include syncing orders between websites and accounting software; customised reporting; syncing stock levels between warehousing and ecommerce; integration with Amazon Vendor Central.