Self-taught engineer.
20+ years of shipping.
I'm Chris Jones. I started writing PHP somewhere around 2003 and never really stopped. I work out of Charlotte, NC, and I've spent most of my career doing one of three things: rescuing legacy stacks, building product from scratch, or running engineering for someone who needed help running engineering.
I'm proficient across frontend, backend, deployment, and administration — full stack in the original sense. I care about development process, coding standards, product, open-source, agile and TDD. After two decades of this I've developed a love for clean, standards-compliant, well-tested, well-patterned code.
What I'm doing now
- Building StreamABA, an operating system for high-growth ABA practices.
- Beta-testing TalkThrough, a voice-first QA documentation tool.
- Running Distillbot, which consolidates AI code reviews into one summary.
- Open to consulting & fractional CTO work — get in touch.
How I work
I lean into AI tools heavily. Not because I think they replace engineers, but because they remove the parts of the job that aren't engineering. The interesting questions — what should exist, what does "done" look like, how do we ship without breaking trust — are still human work. I write about it on the articles page.
Experience
- — Lead engineering org: technical strategy, architecture, code quality, delivery
- — Platform modernization on Laravel + FilamentPHP and scalable AWS infrastructure
- — DevOps: Terraform IaC, GitOps deployments, environment standardization
- — Standardized AI-assisted workflows: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit AI
- — Migrated Yii2 monolith onto Laravel + Filament
- — Authored team-wide coding standards
- — GitOps deploys with GitHub Actions; downtime alerts to Slack
- — Integrations: Daily.co, HeyFlow, BugSnag, HelloSign, Lunar PHP
- — Led 16-site Magento redesign program
- — Directed Magento 1 → Magento 2 migrations
- — Built static SPA tied to Twilio for SMS workflows
- — Architecture, security review, mentoring under the Tech Director
- — Full-stack e-learning platform: Laravel 5, AngularJS, Vue.js
- — TDD with PHPUnit and Mockery
- — Led dev teams across PHP stacks: CodeIgniter, Symfony2, Laravel, Magento, WordPress
- — Mobile-first responsive prototypes; technical sales presentations
- — Symfony2, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, Node.js stack
- — Promoted internally from Sr. Backend; risk / cost / architecture
- — Open-sourced PHP SDK for Bronto SOAP API
- — Symfony2 contributions accepted upstream
- — Invoice, e-commerce, sales-system extensions and modules
- — LAMP backend on Chess.com & ChessKid
- — A/B testing infrastructure that lifted signup rate ~15%
- — Deployed across 15 web servers, 4 DBs, 4 Memcached, Akamai + AWS CDN