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 web developer. Since the late 90s I've been designing and building systems that solve real-world problems, and running the servers they live on. For 20 years I've run Siftware, a lean digital agency that builds and looks after software for clients, and we're building siftware.dev alongside it.

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 the abstractions, like virtualisation and good frameworks, that remove so much drudgery. I still run my own servers, though. Old habits.

What I'm working on right now is on the now page.

Est. 1998

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

bealers@thinkpad:~$ 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: 2026-10-12T04:12:06Z
   Creation Date: 1998-11-12T05:00:00Z
   Registry Expiry Date: 2027-11-11T05:00:00Z

Over that time more than 500 posts have gone up here, some of them not complete rubbish, and the subjects have changed as my work and interests have. The site itself has moved too: five platforms in 26 years, Hugo being the latest.

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

Not me

Other people with my name, in case you're here by mistake:

• 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.