About

Shropgeek Rebellion, May 2018. Thanks to Drew McLellan for the photo.

Hi, I'm Darren Beale or feel free to call me Bealers (it is what I call myself).

By trade I'm a backend web developer and since the late 90's I've been designing and building systems written primarily in PHP that have solved real world problems.

For a long time I was literally full-stack, from writing the HTML all the way to hosting it on a bare metal server I physically drove to the London data centre and plugged into my Cisco router. These days I welcome some of the helpful abstractions like server virtualisation and wonderful development frameworks like Laravel that remove so much drudgery. I particularly welcome AI, as it means what I build in my spare time now looks good too.

Est. 1998

Before WiFi, before blogging, before the iPhone and certainly before there was anything called social media, I have been building websites professionally. As a result, I have also maintained a personal site here at Bealers.com (Wayback Machine link).

bealers@desktop:~$ whois bealers.com
   Domain Name: BEALERS.COM
   Registry Domain ID: 2406668_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
   Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.cloudflare.com
   Registrar URL: http://www.cloudflare.com
   Updated Date: 2022-09-30T09:53:42Z
   Creation Date: 1998-11-12T05:00:00Z

During that time over 500 items have been published to my blog - some of it not complete rubbish - and as my focus and interests have changed, so have the subjects that I've covered.

Externally published writing

It’s time to tackle your legacy apps Boagworld

Web application maintenance should be more of a thing Smashing Magazine

What is Vagrant and why should I care? 24 Ways

Other people with my name who are definitely not me

Just in case you are here mistakenly, these links might help:

Darren Beale (a.k.a.Decoder. D&B Producer, also Bristolian 🙌)

Darren Beale (Founded Musclefood.com)

Contact

I'm @bealers most places (but please don't DM to try and sell me something).

You can also call me on 0845 680 9676 during UK office hours and leave me a message.