Case studies and experience

Evidence from difficult systems, integrations and platform change.

Four commercial experience snapshots show work I carried out within multidisciplinary teams through clearly identified contracting routes. Across them I worked with business analysts, stakeholders and other developers, often alongside external suppliers; the later Specsavers and Virgin Media engagements used agile delivery, while at Arcadia I also reported to senior management. They predate my current AI-assisted method. Dragon Lords is a Seismic Technology product and provides evidence of that current, human-reviewed method.

Contracted commercial experience

A career understanding and improving software for household names

These examples show that work in practice: leading risky platform change, modernising legacy PHP and recovering critical retail integrations when knowledge was missing.

01, Specsavers, through BJSS

From legacy maintenance to trusted subject expertise

Over three and a half years, maintained and extended international Drupal and Symfony platforms, became a subject matter expert for two important subsystems, gave presentations on those areas and led high-risk work in them.

See the Specsavers experience
02, Virgin Media, through Hayes

Moving legacy core PHP toward Symfony

Over two and a half years, contributed within an agile team to legacy PHP migration and extension, including an IP address-management system moved toward Symfony 4.

See the Virgin Media experience
03, Dunelm, through Paul Mason Consulting

Recovering interface knowledge and building replacement middleware

During a fifteen-month engagement, recovered missing interface information, wrote Retail-J XML middleware for a new EPOS system and supported the test team.

See the Dunelm experience
04, Arcadia, through Retail Business Solutions

Configurable multi-brand middleware through to live rollout

Over six years, led middleware designed around disparate brand rules, oversaw live implementation, solved cross-solution issues, and recruited, trained and built tools for the technical implementation team.

See the Arcadia experience

Current AI-assisted method

Detailed, inspectable evidence of the method now used

Full case study, live mobile game
Conceptual view of fragmented source being recovered into tests and documentation

Recovering and modernising a 130,000-line PHP back end

Dragon Lords had fragmented versions, missing source and no established PHPUnit environment. I recovered the system, introduced tests and completed an AI-assisted PHP 5.6 to 8.2 conversion in 14 days, using human-reviewed batches and an automated quality gate.

Does one of these problems sound familiar?

Start with the valuable change, why it matters and what makes the current system difficult to trust.