Quiver Café and Liège Waffles
Static pages turned into sites anyone on the team can edit: still fast, better for SEO, nearly free to run, and with online ordering ready to switch on.
I build useful tools for real businesses.
I'm Kyle, a full-stack engineer and technical support lead in Cape Town. I look past the code to the bigger picture. I see what businesses actually need, how it should be built, and which unknowns are going to catch us out later.
- Cape Town
- UTC+2
- SA & UK citizen
- Open to remote roles
Selected work
WooCommerce.com Marketplace
Co-led the React rebuild of the WooCommerce.com Marketplace, which is still the live marketplace today.
IGrow: viewing-booking tool and rentals site
A viewing-booking tool tied into Zoho CRM, and a rebuilt rentals site that went from GTmetrix E/F to A/B.
What I do
Full-stack web engineering
TypeScript, React, Node.js and PHP. WordPress and WooCommerce in depth, plus modern stacks like Astro and Sanity.
DevOps and infrastructure
Linux servers, NGINX and Caddy, Docker, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and the boring reliability work that keeps sites fast.
Support and team leadership
Five years as a senior escalation engineer at WordPress.com, team management, and building tools that take pressure off the people dealing with customers.
Writing
Fixing WordPress Redirect Issues with Nginx, FastCGI and HTTP/3
TL;DR Problem: WordPress sites running on Nginx with HTTP/3 may experience broken redirects that malform to https:/// instead of the correct domain. Root Cause: Nginx doesn’t properly pass the ?HTTP_HOST header to PHP through FastCGI when using HTTP/3, causing WordPress to generate invalid redirect URLs. Quick Fix: Add this single line to your Nginx configuration:…
Web Components vs. React
Recently, a friend of mine Dan Q shared an interesting post about using a Web Component instead of React to simplify a particular problem. He shared this post: In Dan’s words: What I found myself thinking was… man, this is chunky. React is… not the right tool for this job. I tend to find myself…
Step-by-step: MAMP web server Configuration for Python CGI Scripts Explained on MacOS
This content details a process for configuring MAMP to run Python CGI scripts on a local web server. It outlines steps including creating a cgi-bin directory, modifying Apache settings to allow CGI execution, ensuring Python installation, setting file permissions, and writing a basic script. The setup aims to simplify web server configuration for beginners.
About me
I'm a down-to-earth engineer who loves the web. I've worked on many sides of it. Six years at Automattic (WooCommerce.com and WordPress.com), four as Technical Director of a UK development agency, as well as my own consultancy, devNel. I do my best work in a team, helping everyone else do theirs, and I'd rather build something useful than something generic.
Get in touch
Hiring, or have a project in mind? Send me a message and I'll get back to you.
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