Perry Rylance

About Me

“Perry is celebrated not only for his technical expertise but also for his dedication to high engineering standards and his ability to adapt swiftly to new technologies. His passion for writing clean, efficient and high-performance systems continues to drive our projects forward.”

1986
The year I was born!
1995
Armed with a collection of C++ books, I began to manifest my childhood ambition to become a game programmer.
2000
Having completed my Piano & Theory ABRSM qualifications, I started to branch out into brass and stringed instruments.
2003
I took a BTEC Music Practise at Bridgwater & Taunton College with aspirations to go into composition and arrangement professionally.
2010
I officially began trading as "Rylance Creative Studios" and began phasing out manual trades as my digital portfolio grew.
2017
Began contracting for Code Cabin as a Senior Developer, where I was quickly appointed lead on their flagship WordPress plugin, WP Google Maps.
2021
I worked for Yellow Sub Creative as a Senior Developer on many of their own endeavours and for clients in the sustainability and green tech fields.
2024
I became the Technical Director of Seedable Studios, an agency on a mission to uphold the highest standards in software engineering.

Contributions

700+ sites worked on worldwide
10000+ contributions to GitHub
6500+ open source package installs

Technologies

1. After many years writing web-based multimedia projects with ActionScript 3 and recognizing that JavaScript was about to leave it in the dust, I made the switch. Not having types was something that made me a little uneasy, so I was absolutely on board with TypeScript when it emerged.
  
  To date I've worked on dozens and dozens of TypeScript projects and continue to enjoy it to this day, in the context of web applications and Node.
2. I first noticed PHP during the 4.* years, and first started seriously using it in version 5.*. In spite of the relatively limited choice of packages and frameworks versus JavaScript, I am a massive fan of PHP. It's been a very useful string to have in my development bow and has been invaluable throughout the years for innumerable WordPress projects. In the last five years in particular I have come to really love Laravel.
  
  PHP remains a widely-used language in spite of it's unpopularity in wider circles, and I have high hopes for frameworks like Laravel. One day I would like to contribute to the PHP group's work!
  
  I've worked on so many PHP systems from CLI tools to WordPress plugins and themes to full blown applications, looking back I couldn't possibly list all the projects I've worked on, I'm certain it's in the hundreds, possibly thousands.
3. I was just beginnign to pick up web development as CSS was an emerging technology. I can remember the days before separation of content and styling, and being awestruck watching it evolve from the fundamentals which we already had via legacy elements and inline styles into the feature rich tool it is today.
  
  Whilst I do still sometimes write vanilla CSS, most of the time these day I use SASS / SCSS and various transformers for mobile applications where CSS isn't applicable. I prefer a semantic approach to utility class frameworks, although I am perfectly happy to work with both.
4. After XML popularized XHTML, I adopted the latter very early on. There is nothing fun about writing or working with HTML4 compatible parsers and the myriad rules and caveats that go with working on legacy HTML. Adopting HTML5 was for me, like many others, a no brainer.
  
  As well as all the new elements HTML5 brought with it, it was really great to see standards that place importance on accessibility and searchability come to the forefront.
  
  I have used HTML5 in innumerable projects, and I am sure I will continue to do so!
5. I'm less familiar with C# than my main two languages - TypeScript and PHP - however I am perfectly capable of holding my own and have plenty of experience working on ASP.net projects. I have also worked on many Unity projects over the years and am comfortable with C# in this context, both for desktop and mobile builds.
  
  I work on a Windows machine and have also used C# to write many tools and utilities for work especially where it offers easier integration with some of Windows' features versus Node or PHP. It greatly simplifies tasks such as taking screenshots, for instance.
6. Whilst I did cut my teeth on C++, I wouldn't call myself a veteran by any means. Business on the web and it's traditional platforms and languages quickly took over for me, so C++ isn't something I followed through with using on a daily basis.
  
  With that said, I am perfectly happy working with C++ both in the context of Visual Studio and on Linux based platforms. Some of my C++ is in the wild in commercial games and mods, I've also harnessed it for CUDA applications when I absolutley must leverage the power of the GPU, and more recently I've been writing DSP applications using JUCE. I am also very comfortable in the multi-threaded space in general, and with managing my own memory.
7. I've written a number of C programs, mainly for embedded systems such as the Raspberry Pi, of which I am something of an enthusiast. My most recent notable project was using the Pi to control a relay board - the project used MIDI so millisecond-level precision was imperative. The software used ASLA and the Pi's GPIO pins to control a board of sixteen 12V relays, which in turn controlled a set of sixteen 3D-printed train horns. This could be played using a MIDI keyboard, or used to play your favourite MIDI files on the train horn piano.
  
  I am also working on a rather novel port of DOOM on and off which requires me to get into the nuts and bolts of the official source code, which is written in C. As part of this port project I've also been getting very familiar with the tooling used for pre-processing, compliation and debugging in the context of embedded systems.
8. Erlang is not something I would typically reach for when starting new projects, however it is a space in which I am comfortable working. There are some elements of the Erlang syntax that I wish we had in languages that are more traditional on the web.
  
  I have, of course, worked with Elixir and Phoenix, in the context of building API's intended for high concurrency and real-time use.
1. I was a few years late to the React party. I do like to allow time for frameworks to mature before investing time in learning them, even when they have credentials like React. I got serious about React in the lead up to WordPress 5.0 when it became clear that first-party Gutenberg integration was coming, and along with that, plenty of React in both the editor and in WordPress' blocks system.
  
  React is still my preference when it comes to front end for the web, both for it's flexibility versus other frameworks, but also because it is simply unmatched in terms of the sheer number of open-source components available.
2. Probably my favourite framework of all time to date. It's been interesting to watch the tide of JavaScript frameworks come and go over the last ten years, and to see people coming from that world into Laravel. Laravel really does spoil us in the sense that you have absolutely everything you could possibly need under one well-maintained umbrella.
  
  Both the scaffolding process and the development experience in general is unmatched in my experience. I have used Laravel for dozens of projects now and will continue to do until another framework can match it! Look out for me at Laracon!
3. I first discovered Lumen when I need a bare-bones framework for writing API's and didn't want to start from scratch. This was before JavaScript hosting platforms became widespread, so I needed something that would run on the widely available hosting platforms of the day.
  
  With the emergence of newer technologies like Octane and performance improvements in general to PHP, Lumen has been deprecated in favour of plain Laravel.
4. Not wishing to overlook server-side JavaScript, Next.js is also something I've worked with a great deal. Consequentially I have, of course, worked with Vercel, I've also deployed Next on various VM's and via containers.
  
  I've worked on several commercial Next projects from brochure sites leveraging static generation through to web applications with Next driven API's and databases on the back end.
5. My go-to for when I just want something quick that works with zero configuration. I've engineered tiny microservices for inter-application communication, I've also built relatively large API's using Express.
  
  As well as traditional HTTP and REST based systems, I'm experienced in the sockets world and have used Express to write servers for real-time applications.
6. Microsoft's answer to web development! ASP.net is my tool of choice when I want to write systems and services for the web that integrate with the broader .NET ecosystem.
  
  I've worked on and enjoyed many ASP.net projects and worked with all the tooling around that including Visual Studio and it's platform tools, and all the things that usually accompanty ASP.net like SQL Server, TypeScript and Angular.
1. I never intended to be a WordPress developer, it was practically thrust upon me. Considering it's enormous popularity, I suppose it's something I was never going to avoid completely.
  
  One of the biggest projects I've managed was WordPress' most popular mapping plugin suite, which during my time had just of 500,000 active installations. As well as having several years in the driving seat of this project, doing everything from customer support through to leading development, working in this space put me in touch with thousands of other people from site owners to agencies to other developers.
  
  I have worked on literally thousands of different WordPress sites on all kinds of things from quick customisations and custom blocks through to penetration testing, troubleshooting, optimization, contributing to various plugins and themes, custom plugin integrations, custom API's and 3rd party integrations - I don't think there is any stone I have left unturned in the WordPress world.
2. I have worked on and with Shopify in various contexts, less so on the store front side of things and more on API's that integrate with Shopify in various ways, I've also deployed a handful of Shopify applications and extensions on their app store.
3. I've worked on various projects over the years that interact with eBay's API's for buying, selling, advertising and more. I've worked on projects that deal with the sale of goods but also secondary concerns such as shipping calculators and integration with 3rd party payment gateways and shipping API's.
4. I've worked on the Etsy platform for a handful of projects, mostly on systems that integrate Etsy stores into web applications and vice versa, allowing users to control Etsy stores from their web applications. I really like the whole idea of the platform in general and hope to do more work involing Etsy at some point!
1. After nearly five years in the driving seat of WordPress' most popular mapping suite, I know the Google Maps API's like the back of my hand.

Techniques

TDD

I was a relatively early adopter of test-driven development and have been enjoying libraries such as PHPUnit for almost as long as they've been released. I'm a fan of building from the ground up, starting with unit tests, followed by feature and then end to end. I use TDD with CI / CD to guarantee stability, and to refactor with ease.
OOP

As someone who cut my teeth on C++ in a Windows environment, I was working with the Microsoft Foundation Class library shortly after it was first released. Since then I've built and worked on countless OOP projects and enjoy the pattern to this day.
FP

Even though I am a huge fan of OOP, I am very comfortable in the procedural paradigm too. I've worked on and built software for embedded systems where plain C is desirable, and in more cutting edge tech, I shifted paradigm to FP when writing React apps as soon as it became clear that the library was going that way.
CI / CD

I employ CI / CD wherever possible and tie this into my TDD approach. I've written deployment pipelines for all popular version control platforms, and use this wherever possible to take the hassle out of collaboration and shipping to production.
Debugging

I use stepping debuggers on a daily basis, but I also have a wealth of experience, tools and techniques for debugging non-garbage collected languages, concurrent and parallel applications, and real-time applications.
Refactoring

Over my many years of engineering software, I've worked on a great deal of legacy projects, both in terms of very WET projects which are suffering bloat, but also projects written for legacy platforms and in languages that are no longer in use.
Optimization

As someone who wanted to be a game programmer from a very young age, I've always been a performance enthusiast. As well as my arsenal of debugging techniques, I am also very well versed in identifying and solving bottlenecks in existing projects, and thoroughly experienced in planning to avoid bottlenecks without succumbing to the pitfalls of premature optimization.
2D & 3D Graphics

I am very comfortable in the graphical space and have worked with almost every 2D & 3D graphics library for IBM PC's that has ever been released. I know the fixed pipeline inside out, am very capable of writing shaders and also have experience writing CUDA applications.
Physics

I've worked with all the most popular 2D and 3D physics libraries and used them to breathe life into 2D and 3D games and presentations. I am familiar with all the spatial techniques and data structures which span both physics and graphics.
Audio & DSP

As a lifelong musician, I've been working with and writing audio software for as long as I've been using computers. I'm very eager to expand my portfolio in this area and would love to do more commercial work involving MIDI, signal processing and audiovisual experiences in general.

To get in touch, please drop me a line on contact@