About

Martin Bean

Hi! I’m Martin Bean, an experienced software engineer and web developer based in the UK. I currently lead of a team of developers at a product company called OpenPlay. Prior to this, I worked at Pfizer, first as part of their DevOps team before moving into a tech lead role, where I directed two company-wide transformation and consolidation projects.

Outside of my full time role I run Your Fight Site. Under its banner I operate two services targeting professional wrestling and combat sport promoters: a website builder called Your Fight Site CMS, and a video on demand marketplace called Your Fight Site VOD.

In my spare time I dabble in reverse engineering video games, specifically PlayStation® 1. This has been a hugely interesting endeavour for me, going from knowing little about computer architecture and hardware to learning concepts like CPUs and registers, as well as assembly and the C programming language, and also just how video games were actually made in that time period.

I’m a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge, and enjoy sharing this knowledge. I’m active in communities such as Stack Overflow and the Laracasts forums, and I now share this knowledge in my current role as a team lead.


Books

I have been lucky enough to be involved in the creation of the following books:

  • Technical Editor, Design Patterns in PHP and Laravel (Apress, 2017)
  • Contributor, A Field Guide to Freelancer Finances (FreeAgent, 2016)
  • Author, Laravel 5 Essentials (Packt, 2015)
  • Technical editor, Beginning Node.js (Apress, 2014)

Talks

I’ve also given a handful of talks at my local PHP user group, PHP North East.

  • : What’s New in Laravel 5.3
  • : What’s New in Laravel (since 5.0)
  • : An Introduction to Viaduct
  • : What’s New in Laravel 4.3 Laravel 5