Derek Mclean
Senior Full Stack PHP Software Engineer at McLean Digital Limited
Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Mclean is a Senior Full Stack PHP Software Engineer with over 13 years of professional experience and two decades of hands-on software engineering background, combining deep expertise in PHP, Symfony/Zend/Laminas, Docker, CI/CD and Linux. He excels in software and infrastructure architecture, TDD/BDD/DDD practices, and has repeatedly led upgrades of legacy systems (PHP5→7) and large-scale Symfony platform modernisations. Derek is an active open-source contributor—improving routing in thephpleague/route and hardening Doctrine tree strategies—which reflects his focus on robustness, test coverage and maintainability. He has delivered across diverse sectors (insurance, telecoms, e-commerce, fintech, environmental and sports) and frequently pairs backend API design with developer-friendly tooling like Docker and Jenkins/GitHub Actions. Comfortable as both a hands-on engineer and a technical lead, he also mentors teams and builds reproducible developer environments to speed delivery. Based in Leuven, Belgium, he runs his own contracting practice and is noted for pragmatic refactors that reduce technical debt while enabling new product features.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Chemistry Computing Physics Maths, Chemistry Computing Physics Maths at Woodfarm High School
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
12,253reputation
3.0mreached
829answers
11questions
symfony
top-5%
file-upload
top-5%
laravel
top-5%
post
top-5%
ajax
top-5%
php
top-1%
Github Skills (24)
url-routing10
cms10
middleware10
doctrine10
psr-710
php10
doctrine-orm10
symfony10
symfony-ux10
testing9
post9
ajax9
laravel9
wordpress9
file-upload9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
thephpleague/route
Jun 2019 - Feb 2020
Fast PSR-7 based routing and dispatch component including PSR-15 middleware, built on top of FastRoute.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 5 PRs, 23 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Derek focused on enhancing the routing and dispatch component. They implemented changes to correctly handle route prefixes, added exception handling, and improved request handling by incorporating route parameters into request attributes. Furthermore, they made code modifications to streamline debugging, address middleware behavior, and refactored code for cleaner implementations. These changes show an effort to increase robustness and usability of the library.
dispatchhttp-routerrouterosfastroutephp
Kunstmaan/KunstmaanBundlesCMS
Oct 2017 - Mar 2018
An advanced yet user-friendly content management system, based on the full stack Symfony framework combined with a whole host of community bundles. It provides a full featured, multi-language CMS system with an innovative page and form assembling process, versioning, workflow, translation and media managers and much more.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 27 commits, 45 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the codebase within the Kunstmaan CMS. Their contributions included fixing docblocks for fluent setters, adding public visibility to constructors, addressing strict comparisons, and correcting line endings. They also implemented improvements to media handling, form handling, and redirect functionality, and refactored the media token transformer. Their work demonstrates a focus on code quality, maintainability, and functionality within the Symfony-based CMS.
cmsfull-featuredmulti-languagetranslationcontent-management-system
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