Andy Coates
Chatbot Developer, Technical Lead
Exeter, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndy Coates is a pragmatic software engineer and technical lead based in Exeter with over a decade of commercial experience and more than 15 years coding across freelance and product roles. He turned a prototype career-advice chatbot into a production-ready, multi-tenant system deployed across UK universities and schools, blending OpenAI integrations with Botpress NLU. Comfortable across the stack, Andy focuses on clean, maintainable code and has led teams as Head of Development and in senior engineering roles for long-running products. As a freelancer he builds enduring client relationships by tackling varied domains and shipping dependable solutions. He also contributes to open-source tooling for Laravel model generation, improving relation naming strategies and unit tests to better support diverse database conventions. Known for practical problem-solving, he pairs hands-on implementation with an eye for robust, testable architecture.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Digital Arts, 1st Class (Hons), Bachelor of Science (BS), Digital Arts, 1st Class (Hons) at University of Plymouth
Stackoverflow
10,987reputation
595kreached
12answers
16questions
orm
top-1%
php
top-1%
eloquent
top-1%
laravel
top-1%
Github Skills (17)
eloquent10
laravel-mix10
laravel10
phpunit10
php10
orm10
database8
databases8
scaffold8
magic-methods6
codeigniter6
casting6
nodejs6
javascript6
mongoose-schema6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
reliese/laravel
Feb 2021 - Apr 2021
Reliese Laravel Model Generator
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 1 review, 20 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Andy primarily focused on enhancing the Laravel model generator, specifically addressing relation naming strategies for `BelongsTo` and `HasMany` relationships. Their contributions included implementing and testing the `foreign_key` naming strategy, ensuring correct relation names based on foreign keys, and incorporating unit tests. The user's work aimed to provide more flexible and accurate model generation, aligning with different database structures and naming conventions. They also refactored and tidied test files.
scaffoldphpdatabaseeloquent-modelsmysql-database
digitickets/omnipay-realex
Jan 2015 - Dec 2018
Realex payment gateway driver for the Omnipay library
Contributions:14 releases, 10 PRs, 23 pushes in 3 years 11 months
paymentsomnipaypayment-servicepayment-methodsphp
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