Matthew Baggett
PHP Engineer, Electronics Design Enthusiast, Cloud fondler, Infrastructure as Code Evangelist, Docker Preacher and CI/CD Automation-ist currently residing in Almere, Netherlands. Previously, I’ve lived in Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Manchester, Sheffield and Leicester, England. I’ve written things in a variety of languages outside of the PHP ecosystem, but I always seem to come back to it as a pragmatic choice. I’m originally from Oxford, England.
The latest version of my CV in PDF format is always available here.
| Contact by: | |
|---|---|
| Contracting Company Site: | Grey.ooo |
| Telephone: | +31 (0) 621 34 82 45 |
| LinkedIn: | |
| Email: | matthew@baggett.me |
| GitHub Accounts: | Personal GitHub |
| Benzine Framework Archived |
Abilities & Technologies:
- Build-out of highly available, automatically scaling containerized cluster infrastructure using Docker Swarm.
- Conversion of existing infrastructure and legacy applications into scalable, fault-tolerant dockerized solutions, with extensive experience of orchestration.
- Turn-arounds of failed microservice migrations, reconsolidation into manageable monoliths.
- Has lead projects as Architect and Team Lead.
- Cares about Digital Sovereignty.
- Long experience with cloud & bare metal linux server management, experience with buildroot-based embedded linux systems.
- Virtualization with VMware, Proxmox
- Cloud-like sovereign compute on bare metal, built with Proxmox and cloud-init.
- Experience with single sign-on systems.
- Build Automation and Deployment Management with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Gitlab-CI & Travis.
- 18 years experience of PHP (been at it since 2008!), including modern PHP.
- Expert at reducing TCO of customer cloud systems.
- Infrastructure-as-code evangelist, with Terraform and OpenTofu. (I have a large repo of Opinionated Terraform Modules that let me build out scalable infrastructure in minutes.)
- Symfony, Slim, Laravel & Zend (Now Lamina), Drupal
- Experienced with architecting and building out scalable Microservices with AWS Auto Scaling, and with consolidating them again.
- Unit Testing with PHPUnit & Integration Testing with Playwright/Selenium.
- Committed to improving Code Quality through modern tooling, PHPStan, Code Style enforcement through PHP-CS-Fixer.
- Build massively parallelized ETL pipelines for large data ingress.
- AWS RDS Serverless, AWS Aurora, MariaDB, MySQL and MS SQL database backends, design of database schemas upon them
- Quite fond of Hetzner.
- Experienced with Redis & MQTT as cache and message brokers
- Amazon AWS cloud systems (EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, Elastic Search, Elastic Load Balancer, Route 53, RDS, Elasticache, SES)
- Usage of CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Drupal, WordPress and other proprietary systems (Contented, custom builds)
- Custom module creation for Drupal.
- Use of 3rd party systems and APIs, REST, etc.
- Knowledge of Traefik, Nginx & Apache
- Working in a team on large projects with source control such as Git & Subversion
Employment History
PHP Engineer
Manuevo B.V trading as Shapeways: April 2026 until current
- Microservice Consolidation: Led the change from many small services to one modular application to improve team velocity. Module boundaries are enforced in code. Legacy applications moved in place.
- Updated the libraries and the PHP version. This removed the known exploit risk.
- Rebuilt the container images. They no longer run as root nor do they ship npm, yarn, or gcc. Added support for multiple CPU architectures on native runners.
- Made the build and runtime infrastructure of the geometry pipeline simpler and cheaper.
- Built a self-hosted platform on Proxmox, OpenTofu, Docker Swarm, and ZFS. It has single sign-on. It deploys a preview environment for each branch. A new developer starts the full local stack with one command.
- Raised quality with coverage gates, end-to-end tests, and automatic dependency updates. Wrote shared working rules for AI coding agents.
- Partly integrated an imaging, robotic QC, and inspection system into the existing application.
Freelance Devops & Software Engineer
Grey.ooo: August 2024 - April 2026
- Varied infrastructure and development work for different clients, mostly revolving around ecommerce platforms.
- Scalable, Containerized AWS infrastructure build-out - Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions.
- Containerization of legacy applications and gradual replacements.
- Maintenance of existing infrastructure and applications, build-out of new runtime environments for existing applications.
- Embedded linux system design & microcontroller firmware development.
Devops & Backend Engineer
One Up Sales/Stormburst Studios: March 2023 - August 2024
- Build-out of a highly parallelized data ingest pipeline
- Partial build-out of multi-tiered, multi-tenant datastore
- Implement GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline and related self-host infrastructure
- Implement Terraform infrastructure for Production & QA environments
- Strive for improvements to development practices.
- Deploy bare-metal infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of cloud providers with the same level of redundancy and availability.
- Multi-provider cloud infrastructure built for availability and redundancy within cost constraints.
Devops & Infrastructure Engineer
Superscript B.V: August 2021 - March 2023
- Planning infrastructure & implementation of migration away from Heroku and AWS to self-managed private cloud
- Implement wide-spanning deployment automation and quality control.
- QA environments transferred from home-made node-driven CI/CD pipeline to GitHub Actions and Terraform with QA environments spun up on-demand by commits pushed to branches.
- Refactoring of existing home-grown node-driven CI/CD pipeline.
- Deployment of dozens of varied AWS assets to support the needs of the business.
- Architecting scalable POC for other departments to support the running of a heterogeneous ecosystem of containers in various languages and platforms.
- Primary port of call for business-focused persons to consult regarding cloud services.
Devops Engineer & Laravel Developer
Vice Media: December 2021 - March 2022
- Support existing advertising platform application and picked up where the previous developer left off.
- Dockerize local development.
- Improve production container quality.
- Ticket bustin’ and bug squashin’ for their Laravel+Vue advertising platform application.
Backend PHP Developer
ADPI B.V: January 2021 - August 2021
- Started to introduce Terraform & porting application to docker running on AWS services.
- Feature development on top of existing legacy product.
- Refactored large portions of their extant Laravel application, chiefly around a highly customized mail process.
- Introduction of Unit Testing to product.
- Introduction of CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions.
- Brought in basic disaster recovery.
Senior PHP Developer
Kiesproduct B.V: September 2019 - January 2021
- build-out of highly scalable data ingest pipeline to digest data from thousands of feeds in diverse formats.
- build-out of new platform, greenfield build on PHP7.4, Slim Router, Elastic Search, RDS Serverless, parallelized process workers.
- build-out of brand new multi-cloud architecture, using best-practice infrastructure-as-code tools, highly available, highly scalable clusters of small worker machines to achieve multi-region failure-tolerance.
- Transitioned company to using better (aiming for best) practices, including migration to Git, automated build pipelines, security and access controls, code quality review (automated, and manual).
Senior PHP Developer
TradeTracker Netherlands: February 2019 - September 2019
- Maintenance of existing codebase.
- Build microservices to implement new functionality for existing applications.
- Helped to bring forward a test-welcome approach, driving forward automated pipelines with Gitlab, PHPUnit, Docker.
- Building new functionality to meet business requirements.
- Helping migrate legacy code to remain on a supported platform.
Earlier Career
- Segura Systems: Senior PHP Developer, Docker Devops (2016 - 2019). Dockerized microservices, PHP 5.6 to 7.3.
- Liverpool FC, Inprime Logistics, Frontline Solutions, Savvy Creative: contract PHP and DevOps roles (2015 - 2016).
- BT Engage IT: hosting platform interface for thousands of VMs (2013 - 2015).
- Informed Solutions, eziConex, VoucherCloud: Drupal and WordPress contracts (2011 - 2013).
- Docnet, Motortrak, Webcurl, I-COM, White October: web developer roles (2008 - 2011).
Other
Full Manual drivers licence Dutch Verblijfstitel (Residence Permit)