[CC][About Candidate] Jeremy Coates

[Jeremy Coates]

Hi All,

So this is my attempt at that most awkward of things for engineers, talking about oneself.

I started with PHP back in 1999 (PHP 3.0.12 as I recall), and have worked with many open source projects/frameworks since - most memorably from the battle-scars, ZF1 (from v0.3 - e.g. pre-documentation!). Today, I'm the CEO of Magma Digital Ltd, a business focussed Software Development Agency, in the North West UK. My day job entails client interaction, mentoring my team and still coding at least a couple of days per week.

Before working with code for a living, I worked in the National Health Service (NHS) as an Occupational Therapist, specialising for 6 out of 7 years of practice in Mental Health work. So primarily, people are my career base, today focussed on staff and clients, rather than patients. During that time, I was involved in the special interest group for using computers in therapy (the embarrassingly named, for today, MicroSIG) and spoke on the national level related to this.

Since working the NHS and working under the 24/7 professional code of conduct I was expected to maintain, I joined the relative wild west of web development (I'll happily tell you the full story over a beer sometime if you're interested). With that grounding, I have always pushed for improvement in professionalism both in those directly around me and in a wider form, serving time on the local digital trade body for the Manchester region, Manchester Digital. Also, more recently, serving as one of the founding directors of a similar body for the Lancashire, UK area, Digital Lancashire.

More recently (2008+), from a PHP community perspective, I started the PHPNW user group in Manchester, UK and the related and well received PHPNW community conference that has successfully run, on a not-for-profit basis, for the last nine years. I've also been a speaker at several PHP-related conferences in the UK and Europe, speaking on technologies such Codeception and Ansible, alongside development practices such as defensive programming[1].

Finally, I also find myself regularly mentoring people around the community (given my background, not so surprising I guess) and have had a small hand in helping several other user groups and conferences form or get started, through directly challenging the founders or from sharing our experience and approach gained through PHPNW.

So in summary, things I feel I offer for FIG CC:

* 18 years of PHP & related tech experience
* 18 years running a well respected PHP company
* 9 years founding & running PHPNW community and conference, in Manchester, UK
* 5-6 years of PHP related speaking/tutorial experience
* 7 years experience of professional standards bodies in UK Healthcare
* A long-running desire to see the wider community and its members grow through helping make professionalism the expected norm, I see the FIG as an essential part of that, especially now that FIG 3.0 passed.

So, in conclusion, I hope that helps give some perspective on why I'm standing and what skills and experience I believe I can offer the FIG CC.

Cheers,
Jeremy Coates

[1] https://joind.in/user/phpcodemonkey