tony@sala.dev:~/about $ cat README.md
# Tested, plain code you can run yourself.
I'm Tony Sala, a software engineer with 12+ years of building and running production systems, mostly in PHP and Laravel: banking, pensions, higher education and, most recently, regulated health-tech, where a bug isn't just an inconvenience and "it works on my machine" isn't evidence.
I care about three things: tests that prove the code works, code plain enough that the next person can read it, and owning the infrastructure it runs on. I've worked on contract since 2022, and take on websites, web apps, Android apps, backends and the infrastructure under them.
Five rules I actually work by.
Not a manifesto. These are the habits behind the code I ship every day.
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Code without tests is not production-ready.
I need to know it works, not guess. Tests are written with the code, run on every change, and document what it does.
$ ship # refuses if a test fails -
Explicit over implicit. Simple over clever.
Strict types, honest names, flat code. If an implementation is hard to explain, it's the wrong one.
declare(strict_types=1); -
Small, reversible steps.
Ship daily, in changes small enough to review in one sitting, each one a single command away from rolled back.
$ ship --rollback -
Valid by construction, immutable by default.
If an object exists, it's valid. Changing state returns a new value instead of quietly mutating the old one.
final readonly class Email -
You own everything: code, infrastructure, accounts.
Repositories, cloud accounts, domains and deploy pipelines are in your name and documented, so you can carry on without me.
$ git remote -v # origin: your-org
Career, newest first.
$ git log --oneline --since=2014 · select a row to expand-
A live console for a 4-node k3s cluster: a Rust (axum) API, a Svelte 5 UI, gRPC agents on every node, WebSocket updates and GitOps with Flux. Its own ship pipeline builds, proves, goes live and walks 176 pages with a design check, with one-command rollback. About 1,100 commits and roughly 4,300 tests across Rust, web and Kotlin.
$ ship && ship --rollback
read the Substation case study → -
Top committer on a ~14.7k-commit Laravel 13 / PHP 8.5 codebase: 2,119 commits since August 2025. Added 642 test files and built a 55-check Playwright end-to-end rig. Built a harness that made a vendor tablet's intermittent defect reproducible on demand.
$ phpunit && npx playwright test # 55 checks
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Wrote the first commit and about 61% of all commits on a management platform for fertility clinics: treatment cycles, clinic operations and real-time notifications, on Laravel 12, Next.js 16 and PostgreSQL. Owned the infrastructure too: Terraform, a GitHub Actions deploy and a production move to ARM (AWS Graviton).
$ terraform apply # graviton t4g
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WAVE, the CMS that replaced the university's Liferay site. Top committer, with about 40% of 8,851 commits. Designed a scalable back-end API for the staff course catalogue on Laravel Vapor (serverless AWS) with GraphQL and Algolia search, built the tooling for the move to a headless CMS (Storyblok), and set up development processes for the team.
$ git shortlog -sn | head -1
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Planned and built a new Symfony microservice in a modular architecture, tested with Behat (133 of its 518 commits). Led the migration of multiple master pension trusts, keeping the integration seamless and the data accurate. Improved performance in the core Laravel 8 platform.
$ vendor/bin/behat
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Worked on UAccount, a current-account product. Played a key role in the initial architecture, built on microservices and CQRS, and built a backend banking API integrated with the Modulr payments API.
$ docker compose up # laravel · cassandra
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Designed and built the platform architecture and its API on Laravel 8 with Redis queues, the scheduler and Horizon. Improved server performance with PHP-PM and Nginx, cutting response times and resource use.
$ php artisan horizon
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Supported many clients. Maintained and developed one of the UK's largest recruitment directories, and worked on the Active Housing SaaS product.
$ git log --root
I run my own software.
The homelab
A 4-node Kubernetes (k3s) cluster running software I wrote: a Rust API, a Svelte web UI, gRPC agents on every node and GitOps with Flux. It's where I try things before I'd recommend them to anyone.
Building my own tools
A ship pipeline that builds, proves, imports and goes live, then walks 176 pages with a design check, with one-command rollback. Android apps shipped from the same pipeline. A Telegram agent and alerting with quiet hours.
Need someone to own it end to end?
Tell me what you're building. I reply personally.