Development: Languages, Stacks, Proof

My development story isn't a list of frameworks. It's one platform, maintained and extended for fourteen years, plus the fundamentals that made that possible.

The working stack

PHP, procedural and object-oriented, from version 5 through 8.2 — with my most recent production code (2026) written as dependency-free PHP 8.2: PDO with prepared statements, versioned REST endpoints with API-key authentication, batch processing, an HTML-report parser, automated test scripts. Delphi / RAD Studio (Object Pascal) for the Windows edition — a scarce skill I keep current, valuable wherever business-critical desktop software still earns its keep. SQL at depth: schema design, indexing and query optimization on multi-million-row MariaDB/MySQL tables, plus MS SQL Server. JavaScript/jQuery/AJAX front ends that working people use all day. Integration: REST/JSON, XML/SOAP, webhooks, payment switches, ERP-class connections.

The rarer skill: inherited code

Most developers ship and move on. I stayed — extending, refactoring, and debugging the same living codebases for over a decade, including code written years earlier by a younger me with worse judgment. That builds the habits legacy systems demand: read before changing, reproduce before fixing, respect what works even when it's ugly, and never break production. If your codebase is older than your newest framework, this is the skill you're actually hiring for.

What I don't claim

I'm not a React/Kubernetes/cloud-native engineer, and I won't pretend to be — my modern-framework experience is limited, and I say so. What I offer instead is depth where the industry is thinnest: plain-language fundamentals, database seriousness, legacy fluency (PHP, Delphi, SQL Server), and twenty years of judgment about what breaks systems in production.