Hello! I’m Martin Bean, an experienced web developer and platform engineer based in the UK. Day to day I work with PHP, Laravel, JavaScript and TypeScript, and AWS.

I have over 15 years’ experience in building web-based solutions and APIs for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500s. I currently work for Bauer Media Group as a senior platform engineer.

Outside of my full time role I run a company called Your Fight Site, where I help independent professional wrestling and combat sport promoters through two products: a multi-tenant CMS, and a video on demand platform called Your Fight Site VOD

In my spare time I pursue an interest in reverse engineering, particularly PlayStation® 1 video games. This has been a hugely interesting and rewarding endeavour, where I’ve gone from knowing little about a computer’s internals to gaining a high-level understanding of hardware architecture, CPUs and registers, and both MIPS assembly and the C programming language.

I’m a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge, and enjoy sharing this knowledge and enthusiam in both my work and my spare time. I’m also active in developer communities such as Stack Overflow and the Laracasts forums

Books

I was privileged to be involved in the creation of the following printed books:

• Technical Editor, Design Patterns in PHP and Laravel (Apress, 2017)
• Contributor, A Field Guide to Freelancer Finances (FreeAgent, 2016)
• Author, Laravel 5 Essentials (Packt, 2015)
• Technical editor, Beginning Node.js (Apress, 2014)

Talks

I’ve also given a handful of talks at my local PHP user group, PHP North East

• 20 September 2016: What’s New in Laravel 5.3
• 19 January 2016: What’s New in Laravel (since 5.0)
• 16 June 2015: An Introduction to Viaduct
• 16 September 2014: What’s New in Laravel 4.3 Laravel 5