Hi, I’m Ashley. I’m a software engineer and performance obsessive.

I’m based in Staffordshire, England, where I live with my wife Emily, daughter Harriet, and our dog, Teddy.

I’m a senior software engineer at Laravel, where I work on Forge day-to-day. Forge is a large, complex codebase that relies heavily on queues and handles significant traffic. That means performance matters, and one bad query can waste days of database time.

Before Laravel, I spent over a decade in the WordPress world. I worked as a senior developer at Delicious Brains, contributed to WordPress core, and helped build plugins like WP Offload Media. I also led the development of SpinupWP, a modern server control panel designed for WordPress. Before all of that, I was in the Royal Air Force, maintaining computer systems classified above secret.

I’m also building DebugHawk with my co-founder Lewis. It’s a performance debugging tool for WordPress teams that brings real user monitoring and application profiling together.

I’ve spent the best part of 10 years finding slow things and figuring out why they’re slow. Infrastructure, server configs, database queries, application code. If your Laravel app isn’t performing the way it should, get in touch.