Hailing from Northern England, John Bell is a senior web developer at The Bigger Boat. He started out as a database administrator for a marketing company but was moved on to another role that led him to pursue web development. After almost 3 years with The Bigger Boat, John is now an integral part of the team. We’re delighted to have him with us today as he talks about his background, his PHP journey, and the secret behind The Bigger Boat’s success.
Shahzeb: Hello John, thank you for talking with us today! Before we start, how about you tell our readers about yourself?
John: Absolutely! My name is John Bell, I’m 33 years old, and I live in northern England. I work as a senior web developer for the creative digital agency The Bigger Boat.
Shahzeb: So when and how did you start your career with PHP? Any interesting stories you can share about your journey? What were the challenges you faced in the beginning, and how did you tackle them?
John: My journey with PHP began about 10 years ago. At the time, I was an SQL developer and I used to spend a lot of my time extracting and transforming data. I jumped into PHP as a way to automate some of the tasks I found repetitive. Eventually I moved to a virtual events business that had a custom in-house MVC framework, so my primary focus shifted to PHP.
Fast-forward a few years and I now work with several different PHP frameworks, including Laravel, WordPress, Drupal, and Magento 2, to name a few!
Shahzeb: You currently work at The Bigger Boat as a senior web developer. What does a typical project look like? Could you share any interesting stories?
John: I mentioned earlier I work with several different frameworks. That’s because we are generally a framework agnostic agency and like to get our hands dirty, whether that’s working with an existing project or from a blank slate.
As a general rule though, we handle every aspect of marketing, including web development, creative design, and print. We have clients such as Little Tikes UK, Zapf Creation, and Duckhams using our services.
Shahzeb: What is your experience with PHP, and how important is it for you? What’s the go-to web solution for your clients?
John: My personal experience with PHP is wide-ranging. I’m not afraid to jump in and create something completely custom or utilize extremely helpful frameworks, such as Laravel, to find the best solutions for our clients.
Recently I had to do just that for one of our clients. They had a very bespoke EPOS system that required synchronization with their WooCommerce website. I built a small Laravel application to bridge the gap between both APIs and utilized job queuing with Redis to ensure server efficiency.
Laravel Horizon is a great tool for monitoring job queues and gives the client peace of mind their processes are working as they should be.
Shahzeb: You have excellent overall ratings on The Bigger Boat. What’s your secret? What tools and dev flows do you use for your web projects?
John: Thank you very much! We’ve recently (over the past two years) completely changed the way we handle our development flow. We switched to Github and made use of Github Actions for our CI/CD. We’ve also improved our code review process to increase accuracy within the development department, and it’s really paying off when you see the quality of our work.
Shahzeb: Since you joined The Bigger Boat in 2018, you have completed more than 40 projects. Where did you first hear about The Bigger Boat, and what was your initial impression? How is The Bigger Boat better than other digital agencies?
I first heard of The Bigger Boat when I saw a job application advertised. I think it was a case of being in the right place at the right time because as soon as I saw their website I knew I wanted to work with them. Their eye for detail and simplistic and elegant design style is what initially attracted me.
The best thing about working for The Bigger Boat is their work culture. We’re all a team and have our own slice of the pie to contribute. Everyone is great at their job and enjoys working, and to top it off, with a smile on their face.
Because we have a wide range of clients, no one day is the same, whether we’re all working at home or in the office. So the variation keeps us on our toes and keeps life interesting and engaging.
Shahzeb: As a senior web developer, you must be well aware of frameworks and CMS. Would you like to share your favorites? What makes them stand out from the rest?
John: I do enjoy working with Laravel. The work they have done to create a framework that assists the developer is unrivaled. There are so many different tools, interfaces, and helpers that take the heavy lifting out of working with PHP.
With regards to CMS, I believe WordPress has its place as long as it’s used correctly. I think it’s garnered a divisive reputation because it’s used by developers of many different experience levels. The key to making it work, in my opinion, is to keep the system as clean as you can. Use the tools given to you by the framework as much as possible, and only extend it with a plugin if you really, absolutely need to.
Improve Your PHP App Speed by 300%
Cloudways offers you dedicated servers with SSD storage, custom performance, an optimized stack, and more for 300% faster load times.
Shahzeb: What do you enjoy doing when you’re away from your laptop?
John: I have five children! As you can imagine, my spare time is mostly all about spending time with them and helping my wife. I do manage to venture out once a week to play for a local pool team, though.
Shahzeb: Which type of web hosting would you prefer for your clients? In your opinion, is conventional shared hosting viable for the projects that you do?
John: Without question, we default to Cloudways for all our clients because we believe in the benefits of managed cloud hosting. The pricing structure is so flexible we can offer clients with the smallest budget to the largest a pricing plan that suits their infrastructure and requirements.
Historically, we used a dedicated VPS that hosted several clients at once. But I don’t believe this is viable because if one website causes an issue on a server that causes downtime, all websites experience downtime.
By using Cloudways, every client has their own cost-effective dedicated space.
Shahzeb: What are your thoughts on hosting solutions such as Cloudways? Do you think these solutions add value to PHP-based applications?
John: Aside from the benefits I mentioned above, I absolutely do think Cloudways helps when it comes to developing PHP-based applications. Having a dashboard where you can manage whitelists, caching, cron jobs, domains, CDN, SMTP, staging management, among many, many other features, means we spend less time worrying about server setup and administration and more time hitting the ground running, writing code and doing what we do best.
Shahzeb: It can be hard to balance work with your personal life. So what do you enjoy doing in your spare time? Any hobbies you’d like to share?
John: I like to play pool, and we have a dartboard in the office, so often I take a break from my desk and throw darts for a while. I also like to play chess online.
Shahzeb: Who do you think we should interview next, and why?
John: I bet everyone says the same thing, but I’d really love to see what Jeffrey Way of Laracasts would answer to these questions. His style of mentoring is the best I’ve experienced, and thanks to him I picked up Laravel really easily.
Shahzeb: To inspire our readers, I would appreciate it if you could please share some snapshots of your office space or your current workstation.
Shahzeb: Thank you once again, John!
Shahzeb Ahmed
Shahzeb is a Digital Marketer with a Software Engineering background, works as a Community Manager — PHP Community at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious and aims to learn & share information about PHP & Laravel Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
