Rainy Sundays
Rich Gwilliam's digital shed
Rich Gwilliam Full Stack Developer
Rich is a full stack developer with a love of building cool stuff with PHP, Laravel, Javascript, Linux, and all kinds of open source tech.
He's all about getting stuff done and learning new things to do it right.
Give him money and he'll probably do it for you, he's nice like that.
- Location
- Sheffield, UK
- rich.gwilliam@gmail.com
- Website
- Look up
Jira
I think Jira is one of those platforms, like Magento or Teams, that have expanded so far beyond their original remit that almost everyone is nostalgic for a time when they just did what they wanted and worked properly. Thing is, they still all want a different thing from it.
Jira is a project management tool that reminds me of a swiss army knife that has no handle. It'll run a Kanban board for you, track your issues, log your bugs, and because it's owned by Atlassian - of Github fame - it'll probably integrate nicely with your versioning system so your feature branches are effortlessly linked to your tickets.
Thing is, in my experience, the more you bolt onto it the slower it goes. And if your business has a devoted scrum leader, well, they do like to bolt things on.
In fact in my experience the most sensible approach to Jira is to start chopping things off - it's genuinely best when kept minimal. Backlog management. Maybe a couple of custom fields if they're really necessary. Kanban board for your devs.
And then stop. Come on, you have to still have a use for all those post-its.
I've been using Jira since Jun 2020 (5 years).
Engagements using Jira
Full-stack Developer / Devops Engineer
Hidden
Jul 2022 - Jul 2023At Hidden, I filled the role of an API Developer as well as a Devops Engineer. I updated and expanded existing legacy code to run on AWS Lambda functions for increased efficiency, and created Jenkins build servers for the Unity development team.
- HTML
- Vue
- CSS
- Javascript
- Typescript
- LAMP Stack Admin
- Linux
- Agile
- Ops Development
- Git
- PHP
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon S3 Buckets
- Amazon Lambda Functions
- AWS Suite
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon Cloudflare
- Postman
- API development
- High capacity systems
- Stable Diffusion
- Figma
- FTP
- Git
- Phinx
- Database Migrations
- Jira
- Project planning
- CICD
- Jenkins
- Technical writing
- Generative AI
Senior Software Developer
Patchworks
Jan 2022 - Jul 2022- Git
- PHP
- API development
- Ops Development
- Linux
- Docker
- High capacity systems
- NPM
- NodeJS
- Jira
Senior Web Developer
GoSea Marine
Jun 2021 - Jan 2022- API development
- Vue
- Typescript
- Javascript
- CSS
- Git
- High capacity systems
- Jira
- CICD
Senior Web Developer
Vivedia
Jun 2020 - Jul 2021At Vivedia I worked on high-volume API systems providing on-demand streaming video to customers. As a personal project, I updated internal systems to greatly improve the efficiency of services supporting the vital ops team.
- PHP
- Laravel
- Vue
- Agile
- API development
- DataTables
- Ops Development
- Git
- Jira
- Project planning
- CICD
Contract Senior Full-stack Developer
STS Commercial
Feb 2025 - Aug 2025Development of high-precision bespoke analytics and diagnostic modules on a Laravel base to surface opportunities and weaknesses in extremely high-volume, fast moving Fintech data and fine-tune performance for emerging markets. Innovative and intuitive modelling of data, completely revolutionizing how stakeholders analyse performance.
- Laravel
- Javascript
- CSS
- HTML
- PHP
- API development
- Vue
- Database Migrations
- Linux
- Git
- Docker
- SQL
- Figma
- LAMP Stack Admin
- BASH
- NPM
- NodeJS
- Postman
- High capacity systems
- Ops Development
- Jira
- MAMP stack admin
- Technical writing
Contract Senior Full-stack Developer
Polygon
Jul 2024 - Nov 2024Maintenance and upgrade of a legacy native PHP 5.6 API with massive data sets to provide new functionality for clients both inside and outside the company.
- PHP
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
- API development
- Postman
- Vue
- Apache
- Database Migrations
- Agile
- Git
- SQL
- NPM
- Jira
- CICD