I work at a small design agency, starting as a "front end" person back when that meant "take a photoshop visual and turn that into HTML and CSS". Before responsive design and iPhones.

I'm self-taught, and my role has expanded to cover almost everything required on a technical side, including:

• CMS setup and development with CraftCMS
• PHP Plugin development (for CraftCMS)
• Linux server administration
  • Setting up servers
  • BASH scripting for automation of tasks
  • Apache/Caddy/PHP/MySQL
• DDEV/Vite for local development
• SCSS/PCSS
• Modern "Vanilla" JavaScript
• HTML / CSS advancements (it does change!)
• GIT
• Documentation

I'm responsible for almost all the technical decisions and flow for all web infrastructure and projects we create, host, and manage.

I've been a web developer for about twenty years, starting in the days when Zeldman released Designing With Web Standards; Eric Meyer was writing books to popularise CSS; and Dan Cederholm was encouraging front-end "Web Standard Solutions". XHTML was a thing, Inspector/Firebug were not.

I've seen a lot, and a huge portion of the skills and knowledge from those days carry over to today. If you want to make an accessible, fast, high quality website - you need to know these core technologies. Core tech will always be relevent, and frameworks with their associated opinions come and go.

Tools are not skills, but choosing the right tool for the right job certainly is. I currently do not build SPA's, and so I do not much use REACT / Vue / Angular etc.

• Middle aged white guy attempting to become less ignorant over time.
• I try to listen to people different from myself, and do my own lifting so I'm not adding to other people's burdens.

• Mastodon: @[email protected]
• Instagram @mattwilcoxuk