About

I’m Janey, a backend developer based in Cape Town. I started out in 2009 building Flash textbooks and banner ads (yes, really), spent well over a decade in PHP and Drupal, and these days work mostly in TypeScript and Node on AWS.

Most of my career has been at digital agencies and media companies. I’ve built and maintained sites for TV channels, news publishers, universities, banks and fast-food brands, and a Drupal platform serving a dozen large European media titles to separate frontends over GraphQL. Now I spend most of my time on serverless backends: event-driven pipelines built from Lambda functions, Step Functions and queues. Along the way I’ve led development teams, mentored juniors and set up more deployment pipelines than I can count.

I care about code that’s clean, documented and easy for the next person to change, and about sites that stay fast under real traffic.

Things I know well

• TypeScript & Node: backend services, APIs and microservices
• AWS serverless: Lambda, Step Functions, SQS and the event-driven plumbing around them
• Drupal: site building, custom modules, Drupal 7 → modern upgrades and content migrations (Acquia certified for Drupal 7 and 9)
• PHP: Laravel, WordPress, Magento and plenty of custom code
• APIs: GraphQL and REST, headless CMS setups
• Performance: Varnish and caching strategies for busy sites
• DevOps: Git, Composer, Drush, CI/CD and auto-deploys to cloud servers

Get in touch

Happy to chat about TypeScript, AWS serverless, Drupal, migrations, performance, or anything I’ve written about. Email me at hello@janey.dev, or see my full work history onLinkedIn.