Hey there, I'm Ethan.

I'm a senior full-stack web developer living just outside Cardiff, and my obsession with the web started embarrassingly early.

I was about 8 years old when I watched my mum sit down at the computer and write a website for our family business. Through the eyes of an 8-year-old, watching those weird alien-looking tags transform into an actual website that anyone in the world could visit felt like pure magic. I was hooked.

During my teenage years, when I probably should have been falling out of trees or breaking bones like a normal kid, I was teaching myself PHP. Sad, I know. But genuinely great fun. I spent one summer building my own social network for young people, complete with avatars, a digital currency, a virtual clothes shop where the community could design and sell their own items, and a fully custom forum. All hand-rolled in PHP and MySQL. At its peak it had over 50 concurrent users online, which felt enormous at the time. That was until it got hacked. Turns out I hadn't spent quite enough time learning about SQL injection. Lesson learned the hard way.

Fresh out of university I joined CREO, a busy digital agency in Cardiff, as a web developer. Up to that point most of my experience had been custom PHP and Laravel builds, so being thrown into WordPress mid-project was a bit of a baptism of fire. But I thrived. Over the years I became a core part of the development team, taking ownership of multiple projects and seeing them through from first commit to launch. I got to build real relationships with clients, understanding what actually makes businesses tick and why building to their needs, not just to a spec, is what separates good work from great work. One of the highlights was leading the development of the Snowdonia National Park website, a project that gave me a genuine insight into the day-to-day of one of the UK's most treasured national parks, and one I'm genuinely proud to have been part of.

For the past three years I've been a full-stack developer at 3ev, another digital agency, but with a client base that spans national volunteering platforms to global travel brands. I played an integral role in the rebuild of the Oliver's Travels website - migrating over a decade's worth of content from their legacy Typo3 platform into a modern headless WordPress and custom Laravel setup. Click here to learn more about my involvement in this project.

When I'm not at my desk (or very occasionally, standing at it), you'll find me hanging out with my two kids - aged 1 and 3, and absolutely feral, or quietly recovering from hanging out with my kids. Beyond that, I like walking my dog Bella along the South Wales coast path, making a fool of myself on Forza, and eating lasagne. Not all at once.