about me
Hi there, I’m Ray Blair
Technical Leader | Full-Stack Software Engineer PHP, JS, DevOps | Certified ScrumMaster
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
I turn messy technical problems into systems that scale without becoming fragile - with a bias toward pragmatism, developer experience, and the people building them.
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Laravel
- Vue.js
- Python
- Game Dev
- C
- SDL
- Next.js
- Nuxt.js
- Node.js
- React
- Solid.js
- Symfony
What I care about
- ›Pragmatic architecture over dogma.
- ›Removing technical debt, improving DX and efficiency.
- ›Mentoring engineers and growing healthy teams.
- ›Open discussion about trade-offs, not “perfect” solutions.
Companies I've worked with
Recent articles
All articles →November 2025
How I Built a 65 Million Item Array in PHP... Kind Of
Why PHP arrays are secretly memory-hungry hash tables - and how I used FFI and C structs to fit 65 million items into memory anyway.
August 2024
Understanding Service Containers in PHP
How dependency injection containers store services, resolve their dependencies, and manage lifecycles - built up from scratch with a worked PHP-DI example.
March 2024
PSR-4 - Autoloader
How class autoloading actually works in PHP, and how to write a PSR-4 compliant autoloader yourself with spl_autoload_register - and when to just use Composer.
Available for consulting
Technical leadership, audits, and helping teams ship better software.