About Shortdark

Freelance Software Developer

My name is Neil Ludlow, I live in Sheffield, UK and since around 2006 I have been a freelance software developer.

Tech Stack

My current (2024) tech stack looks something like this...

• PHP: Plain OO PHP, Laravel, WordPress.
• All Databases: SQL (MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, Firebase Firestore).
• JavaScript: Plain javascript, NodeJS, NestJS, ReactJS, VueJS, React Native.
• AWS: IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, Cloudwatch, CloudFront, lambda@edge, Lightsail, certificate manager, GuardDuty, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancer, WAF, Code Pipeline
• CloudFlare
• HTML 5
• CSS: Plain CSS, Bulma, Tailwind, Bootstrap
• Queues: Rabbit MQ, Redis
• Webservers: Apache2 and Nginx
• OS: Linux (main current develpoment environment), MacOS and Windows.
• Source Control: Git, SVN.
• Testing: TDD
• Bash scripts
• APIs: Gmail, Google Maps, Algolia, financial data, weather data.

Additional languages where I do not have any commercial experience, as yet, but have completed non-commercial projects...

• Python
• Flutter
• Rust

Example Projects

Here are some example projects I have created that are all free to download and use...

• Various WordPress Plugins
• Various PHP Composer Packages
• Various Android Apps
• Various iPhone Apps

Experience

As well as being a freelance developer, I have also worked for multiple companies. Please contact me for a full list of the companies I have worked with.

Domain Name History

Originally, shortdark was a subdomain of an internet provider's domain, that would have been around 1999. Since then, the main domain has gone something like this...

• 2001 - shortdark.com (I lost the domain between 2004 and 2006)
• 2007 - shortdark.net
• 2020 - shortdark.co.uk