The Journey
From loading BASIC programs on a Commodore 64 to riding the AI wave. Nearly three decades of building on the web.
Santa Claus brought me a Commodore 64 which I adored.
Strangely, our primary school organised computer classes where we learned BASIC. The C64 taught me the importance of patience — those loading times!
Wrote my first HTML and built my first webpage in Notepad. It was like discovering fire!
Learned Perl... badly. Devoured everything on Matt's Script Archive
Registered so.many.domain.names
Found and used every free hosting service on the planet
Reverse engineered all the big websites. Tables and spacers FTW!
Read "Weaving the Web" by Tim Berners-Lee. Mind = Blown 🤯
Discovered this cool new language called PHP3 :)
Dreamweaver 
Fireworks 
Photoshop 
vs 
Became pretty competent at Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, and Photoshop.
All paid for of course. 🏴☠️
Built websites for anyone who wanted one while studying at DIT. Watched IE5 win the first browser war.
B.Sc. Management (International Finance) from DIT — First Class Honours (1.1)
Learned all the SQL while working at Icon. Made so many more websites and a few web apps.
Worked in Leipzig attempting to build Xero... 15 years too early. Stumbled into becoming their main frontend engineer.
Built themes for PHP-Nuke. Sold my first digital product — will never forget it!
Joined a small web agency in Dublin right in the middle of the dot com bust. Learned how to sell. Learned how to manage website and web app projects for some of the largest brands in Ireland and the UK. Learned how to manage and grow teams.
We survived the Celtic Tiger crash by working our fucking asses off. Met some amazingly talented people who continue to do great things — including my now co-founder Simon Tomkins.
Ran joomlacreative making Joomla templates. Moderately successful. Loved Joomla despite its rough edges.
Started taking WordPress seriously. This thing might actually be going places!
Rebranded themesforge to focus on WordPress. Built many WordPress websites. Struggled with the lack of a good eCommerce plugin (while also flirting with PrestaShop, Magento and OS Commerce).
Stopped working on themesforge to start CommerceGurus with Simon. The world's first WooCommerce theme specialists.
We released some big hits on ThemeForest as WooCommerce took off. 🚀
COVID hits. eCommerce takes off like a rocket — as does Shoptimizer. 🚀 Help some of our VIP customers (who are some of the biggest Woo customers on the planet) to their first $1m dollar days.
Back to in-person WordCamps
First podcast appearance on Do the Woo
Launched CommerceKit and Shopify apps
AI turns everything upside down. And I'm here for it.