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
CSS
Markup's fully featured fashion advisor
This will date me: the first time I had to retrain myself it was exchanging the awkward, dependable rigidity of table structure for cascading stylesheets' semantic flow.
If your HTML tells data what it is - and semantically, it should - CSS tells it how it should be displayed. It's a subtle art, there are a lot of moving parts to it - and a lot of screens to account for. Once Javascript gets involved and your CMS is injecting an unknown amount of content into your template, CSS really defines front-end development as a discipline in itself and has done for decades.
It's one I've occupied myself on many occasions. I pride myself that while a lot of "Full Stack" coders know enough CSS to flow a document and leave it as that, I take it seriously enough that I can - and have - stand in my own right as a Front-End developer.
I've used a few CSS Frameworks - this website uses Bulma, which I find to be the optimal balance between lightweight and useful for flowing structure. I have my disagreements with Tailwind - but since everyone else seems to love it, I'm more than competent with it.
An exciting development in CSS is SCSS (or SASS), which is to say "front end developers wanted an excuse to say their code is compiling." I'm joking, they're great.
SCSS is essentially a shorthand for CSS that allows you to layout your styles in whatever manner makes sense to your project - set up variables, nest them - and at build time, SCSS will crunch them down to clean, optimized CSS.
I love them, especially when combined with Vue.
I've been using CSS since May 2007 (18 years).
Engagements using CSS
Web Developer
Pontin's Holidays
May 2007 - Jan 2008- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
- PHP
- Wordpress
- Drupal
Web Developer
Russell Grant Astrology Limited
Jan 2008 - Nov 2008- HTML
- PHP
- CSS
- Photoshop
- Javascript
- Drupal
Web Developer
RCKT
Nov 2008 - Apr 2010- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
- Photoshop
- Fireworks
- Jquery
- Wordpress
- ModX
- ActionScript
- Dreamweaver
- Flash
- HTML Email
- Magento
- MAMP stack admin
Web Developer
Dig For Fire
Apr 2010 - Apr 2011- HTML
- HTML Email
- CSS
- Wordpress
- Photoshop
- Drupal
- Wordpress
- Javascript
- Jquery
- Stakeholder Interaction
Senior PHP Developer
ASL Holdings Ltd
May 2012 - Feb 2020For ASL I developed several long-lived and high volume telemetry systems. These processed large amounts of data and delivered it for rendering in charts and tables on a daily basis.
- HTML
- CSS
- Photoshop
- Javascript
- Jquery
- API development
- SQL
- BASH
- Linux
- DataTables
- LAMP Stack Admin
- FTP
- Git
- CICD
- Technical writing
Senior Web Developer
GoSea Marine
Jun 2021 - Jan 2022- API development
- Vue
- Typescript
- Javascript
- CSS
- Git
- High capacity systems
- Jira
- CICD
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
Contract Senior Full-stack Developer
Eido Healthcare
Feb 2024 - Jun 2024Successful resurrection of a mothballed legacy Craft CMS project without documentation or input from the original developer; planning and provisioning of AWS infrastructure to support the software based on Docker images.
- PHP
- HTML
- CSS
- SQL
- Git
- NPM
- Javascript
- Craft CMS
- Linux
- LAMP Stack Admin
- Amazon EC2
- AWS Suite
- Laravel
- Docker
- BASH
- Figma
- Project planning
- Ops Development
- High capacity systems
- Apache
- Postman
- API development
- 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
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