I’m Richard Styles. I build web apps in the UK, mostly with Laravel and its friends.

I got hooked on computers around ten or eleven, when our school had just a couple of them tucked away in the corner and nobody had heard of the internet yet. By college I was splitting my time between the computing and electronics benches — sure I wanted to build things, not yet sure what. A software engineering degree eventually settled that.

Out of uni I landed at a pub group and spent nearly seven years wearing every IT hat going — which I loved, but eventually I wanted to go deep rather than broad. That turned out to be Laravel. I moved to a hosting company in Manchester, started working remotely for the first time, and had my first son. A job or two later I’m still fully remote, still in the Laravel world, and raising two boys between pull requests.

Outside the day job I’m usually tinkering on something of my own. I’ve been chipping away at udeploy.dev — a SaaS that hasn’t quite launched yet but has spawned a handful of open source encryption packages along the way. More recently I’ve been building Retrospace with a heavy dose of Claude, partly because it’s an interesting product and partly because I’m curious how far AI-assisted development can go without sacrificing code quality.

Away from the keyboard — or the work one, at least — I’ve dabbled in bouldering and running over the years, both patchier since the boys arrived. Photography used to be a bigger thing too; the photos on the landing page are mine, even if it’s been a while since I last picked up a camera in earnest.