Expert profile

Oliver Burton

Senior Laravel Developer · United Kingdom

Oliver Burton is a UK-based senior PHP and Laravel developer. He works UK hours, remotely by default, with businesses that have a real application to build, fix, maintain, upgrade or take over — not brochure sites and not junior ticket queues. Work typically involves inherited Laravel codebases, API and ERP/business-system integrations, internal tools and SaaS billing paths, and the operational detail that keeps an application supportable: tests, queues, Horizon, Laravel Forge deploys, logging and a clear upgrade path. He is the founder of HTML Studio and works directly with clients rather than handing delivery to an uninvolved account team.

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Oliver Burton, Senior Laravel Developer

Specialisms

Laravel application support and maintenance retainers
Takeover of inherited or abandoned Laravel codebases
Version upgrades and technical-debt remediation
API development, Sanctum and third-party integrations
Internal tools, admin dashboards and SaaS billing paths
Performance investigation
Security-minded code review (not a penetration test)

Technologies used

Laravel
PHP
REST APIs
Laravel Sanctum
Livewire
Inertia
Vue
application integrations
legacy PHP modernisation
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Redis
Laravel Horizon
queues
Stripe
Laravel Forge
Pest
PHPUnit
WooCommerce
WordPress
ERP integrations

First-hand process

How I review an inherited Laravel codebase

This is the sequence used when the previous developer has left, documentation is thin, and production still has customers on it. It is a review, not a performance. Nothing here is a penetration test.

Setup / reproducibility

Can a new engineer boot the app from the repo and a documented .env.example? If not, every other finding is provisional.

Dependencies

composer.lock vs abandoned packages, abandoned Laravel version, and packages that pin you to an old PHP.

Authentication / authorization

Guards, policies, forgotten admin routes, leftover debug users, API token hygiene.

Validation

Form Requests vs inline validation vs none. Especially on money, imports, and webhooks.

Data integrity

Migrations that were edited in place, missing foreign keys, JSON columns used as a dump, silent failed jobs that were the “integration”.

Secrets / config

APP_DEBUG, keys in Git, shared APP_KEY across environments, .env on a web root.

Queues / jobs

Is a worker actually running? Is Horizon/supervisor documented? What retries? What is on sync driver in production?

External integrations

Webhooks without signature checks, polling instead of events, credentials belonging to a personal Stripe/Xero account.

Logging

Can you reconstruct an incident without SSHing around? Channels, PII in logs, noise vs signal.

Tests

Characterisation coverage on the paths that lose money or trust. A green suite that never hits HTTP is not the same thing.

Deployment

Who can release? Zero-downtime or “hope FTP works”? Rollback?

Backups

Database and storage. Off-server. Restore tested. Not a hosting checkbox nobody has tried.

Performance

N+1, unbounded exports, missing indexes, queue lag mistaken for “the server”.

Upgrade path

What Laravel/PHP are you actually on, and what would break if you moved?

Selected projects

Published HTML Studio work. Clients are described by industry, not always named. Stacks and outcomes match the public case studies — including figures HTML Studio has already published.

B2B distribution · UK-wide. High-volume distributor whose customers needed stock, pricing and ordering without calling sales.