Mark Beech is a seasoned web development leader with 11 years of professional experience and a long tenure growing through hands-on roles to Director of Web Development at Gradcracker. He combines practical back-end skill—evidenced by meaningful contributions to the popular PHP CrawlerDetect project improving bot detection—with strategic leadership overseeing web platforms and teams. Based in York, Mark's background in Multimedia & Virtual Reality Design underpins a pragmatic approach to UX-aware engineering and product-focused delivery. Known for shipping dependable systems and incrementally improving core libraries, he balances code-level attention to detail with broad responsibility for web strategy and team development.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BA(hons), Multimedia & Virtual Reality Design, BA(hons), Multimedia & Virtual Reality Design at The University of Huddersfield
🕷 CrawlerDetect is a PHP class for detecting bots/crawlers/spiders via the user agent
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:2 releases, 24 commits, 9 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Mark significantly contributed to the `crawler-detect` repository, primarily focused on enhancing the detection capabilities of the PHP class. Their work involved adding numerous new bot user agents to the `CrawlerDetect.php` file, improving its ability to identify various web crawlers and bots. They also addressed minor issues, such as fixing a missing comma, and incorporated a test to ensure the uniqueness of regex patterns. These actions enhanced the accuracy and completeness of the bot detection library.
Contributions:4 releases, 5 PRs, 11 pushes in 3 years 6 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Mark Beech - Director - Web Development at Gradcracker