About
Lucidlogic is Gareth Edwards. I graduated with a Bachelor of Business Science and Honours in Information Systems in 2004 from the University of Cape Town. I have worked in web development in Johannesburg and Edinburgh with progressive new media companies and now call Cape Town home.
What I do
I am a web developer. I write clean, well engineered object oriented code usually following a MVC framework and believe in re-usability. I am available for hire as a freelance programmer for new web development, upgrade your existing PHP application or debug PHP code.
I can program custom PHP web applications from the ground up, upgrade existing PHP code, or install and customize software for you. I can also take over existing projects and finish, build onto or even rebuild them where needed.
If you need of a new web site developed, I can take care of all aspects of website development and web programming. I can use my own libraries, off the shelf , or existing custom-built solutions.
Technologies and Methodologies
When developing from the ground up, I always adhere to the systems development life-cycle.
Planning
This involves a meeting with you to discus what you need and when you need it. I send a quote, you review the quote and once we both agree on your requirements, the project kicks off.
Analysis
Depending on the requirements, this phase involves using Unified Modeling Language to represent the scope of the project and information architecture report to display the different components to be developed and how they fit into the scope.
Design
Strictly speaking this wouldn’t be the design of XHTML but rather the structure and methodologies of the code used. As mentioned, I use a MVC framework and Object Oriented PHP, thus scalable rapidly developed applications can be coded. Using an existing framework means I have a library of classes and methods to draw from and I don’t have to ‘re-invent the wheel’.
When designing the Database, I adhere strictly to a relational database structure with normalization being a top priority. This makes the classes easier to code, makes the end project run faster and avoids data redundancy and errors.
Implementation
I am a keen advocate for version control and SVN is my weapon of choice. After integrating this into my work, I have yet to have a problem. This allows me to role back any file to any version, check differences between versions resulting in a bulletproof code repository.
The implementation of your project will involve installing the database, uploading your files and tweaking any parameters accordingly. Then your site is live.
Maintenance
I worked on too many projects from other developers code to realise the nightmare of not using a framework.
The MCV framework allows easily maintainable code thus anyone can actually add modules to the existing application. So anytime down the line, another developer can understand and work with my code.