I'm Mikey. I'm a Full Stack Web Developer and DevOps Engineer. I'm 33. Based in Nottingham in the UK. My framework of choice is Laravel, and my day job is Craft CMS.
I code for a living. Then, when I get home, I code some more. It's just who I am. I've done many other roles but my path has somehow always taken me back to web and software development.
My past has had me working in kitchens, from potwashing, to professional cheffing, to flipping chicken and burgers. However, programming has always appealed more to me than anything else, and has been a driving force in my life.
I'm passionate about good, clean, readable code. Well documented code is happy code. I love a real challenge which I can puzzle out. The sense of achievement I get when 'get' something is nothing short of euphoric. I'm also passionate about languages. PHP, CSS, HTML, SQL, JavaScript, jQuery, Bash and the LAMP stack are all things which I use daily. All these acronyms you see in "Wanted: Web Developer" ads, I love them all equally. (Except maybe you, JavaScript.)
I've always been told that I'm somewhat of a linguist. At school I picked up languages quite quickly, and was pretty fluent in them by the time I departed. There's something magical to me about language. The constructs, the rules and regulations, and ultimately, the patterns. I think that is also a part of what attracts me to programming. There are patterns. EVERYWHERE.
Typically this is where I'd showcase all of the websites which I have built over the 12 years of software development (Yep, I started this journey at age 14), however - 12 years is a long time, and unfortunately I have let more domains expire than I have got live sites left.I used to be the proud owner of over 50 domains, each with it's own project;
- There was a HTML5 Boilerplate called switchtohtml5 which got featured in multiple design publications across the net.
- There was a twitter image host - before twitter started hosting images.
- There was a URL shortener. Well, there still is, but it keeps getting embroiled in legal issues as a result of spam.
- There were countless forums and blogs, often multisites.
- There were at least two social networks, which I made myself, from scratch.
- One was 30 Day Challenges - which expired.
- There were at least three websites from which I freelanced my services for various forum software, sold add ons and themes, and generally helped others out.
- And there is this site. Mikeylicio.us - which was my first personal site, and will be the last site to go. If this site disappears, I doubt you'll hear from me again.
My problem is, that I look at all of those sites and I want to refactor and rebuild. Constantly improve and make things better. However, I can't do that to so many sites. So really, it's a blessing that they're no longer there.
Anyway - I think you may know a little more about me, as this page suggests. If you want to get in touch, you can just tweet me. I'm @MadMikeyB on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!