Martyn Woollard

Full-Stack Developer — PHP, Symfony & Laravel

Martyn Woollard

Ten years turning slow, fragile PHP apps into fast, maintainable ones — and building new tools from scratch when there isn't one yet.

View My Work

Your PHP app still runs — barely.

Aging Symfony/Laravel codebases don't have to mean rewrites. I upgrade PHP and framework versions safely, one major version at a time, with real regression checks at every step — no "it works on my machine" guesswork.

Fewer security warnings, faster page loads, a codebase your next developer won't dread.

You need something built, not just discussed.

Custom internal tools, admin dashboards, or customer-facing apps — built full-stack with Symfony/Laravel on the backend and React or Angular where the UI actually needs it.

A working tool in weeks, not a requirements doc that never ships.

Your API falls over under real traffic.

Slow queries, N+1 problems, endpoints that were never meant to serve this much load. I profile, index, cache, and restructure until the numbers hold up.

APIs that scale with your product instead of becoming the bottleneck.

Nobody on the team wants to touch that codebase.

Undocumented legacy systems are a liability every time someone leaves. I do focused audits — what's fragile, what's safe to change, what should be rewritten — and leave the team with a map, not just a report.

Less tribal knowledge, more confidence making changes.

Let's talk

$ ls ~/games

I also make games.

Original browser games with my own engines underneath. Three are playable right now and the fourth has its first level up: no download, no install.

Playable now Tethered Darkness Gothic horror JRPG Every grave in Hollowmere has a lantern, and the lanterns keep the dead below. Tonight they are going out. Playable now The Village of Suffering Grim isometric real-time strategy Villagers dig up the graveyard. The dead rise as skeletons. The skeletons go below to fight demons for the organs that make the next army stronger. Playable now Assimilate Physics merge puzzler Two of a kind that touch assimilate into the next thing up. It's fifteen steps from a heart to Nanna. In development Life Detected Sci-fi horror first-person shooter A motion tracker you listen to, and corridors darker than they should be.
See the games