Welcome to my portfolio and thank you so much for taking the time to look at it. My name is Ben Wicks and I am a full stack developer living in Braintree, Essex.
Having previously worked mainly in IT support jobs I started to learn programming in PHP as a hobby and quickly realised that this is where my passion lay. I soon started to experiment with creating websites and from this learned more about CSS, HTML and MySQL.
I started working as a Web Developer / Systems Administrator at a computer game developer called Laughing Jackal and split my time between developing and maintaining the company’s websites and supporting their IT infrastructure.
I spent 7 happy years there until I was made redundant in June 2015. Being able to learn on the job in a creative atmosphere was invaluable experience and I worked on a variety of different projects including developing Magento ecommerce web stores and creating a hand made CMS and blogging platform for Laughing Jackal and their sister company Ghostlight.
In my spare time I carried on teaching myself new technologies and have been testing them on my own website PriceShed.com. The site started out as a simple PHP and MySQL implementation and progressed to using the CodeIgniter framework. Searching for a way to speed up page loading times I have subsequently converted the site to the Phalcon framework.
Below you will find some examples of my work, feel free to look around. If you would like to get in touch with me you can do so using the social media links at the top or bottom of the page.