When I first started with VictoriaPlum.com (or VictoriaPlumb.com as they were known then) in September 2012, there was myself and Jon Coates as members of the IT team, that covered everything from development, hosting and infrastructure. Hosting was supplied by Rackspace and infrastructure was outsourced however we were still responsible for it all. So we took about building a team that would enable us to keep up with the pace of the growth of the business.

Over the years the team has grown from those two members to a twenty strong team of engineers, devops, product and UX.

I introduced Peer to Peer code reviews, Object Oriented and Event driven design, Continuous integration and Unit testing. With the introduction of the devops team my colleagues Patrick Dobbs and James Booth have taken this all further using Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Docker and Gitlab to give us first class Continuous deployment.

I also introduced coding standards for both PHP (based on PSR standards) and JavaScript (based on The AirBnB Javascript style guide)

The original codebase for the site was written in CodeIgniter and all data came from a MySQL database with no indexes and no caching in sight!

It now uses Laravel as a framework and leverages the event driven capabilities of that framework. Data comes from Postgres and the site heavily utilises the Varnish HTTP cache.

We also have several microservices built on top of Laravel Zero for interacting with mainly third party APIs and the various systems and sites communicate via message queues using RabbitMQ.

One of the key areas I lead in is the systems for the delivery of the physical products (i.e. customers actually receiving their bathroom). This involves everything from warehouse holidays, carrier holidays, areas that carriers can and cannot deliver to, warehouse pick capacity. VictoriaPlum.com also has its own delivery network, so this requires systems to hold the data and logic for that to work.

In 2019 VictoriaPlum.com won the FTA (Freight Transport Association) Logistics award for most Innovative company of the year. All the things listed I wrote the systems for (apart from the route planning which is taken care of by Maxoptra - however I performed the investigation into which route planning provider would be the best fit for the business in terms of technical and logistics requirements).

Throughout this time I have worked with all departments in the company from Customer Services to Commercial (Supply Chain and Product buyers) to the Warehouse Distribution Centre / Delivery Last Mile team to understand and build the systems they require to play their role in the success of the company. This is both pre and post us having a dedicated Product team.

With the introduction of the Product team I have helped guide us in following Agile methodologies.