Hello — I’m Jeremy Coates
I’ve spent around thirty years building the kind of software businesses quietly run on. I started writing code professionally in the 1990s, built and ran a twenty-person software agency, and since 2020 I’ve worked independently with a small number of clients who need a senior technologist they can trust — not a revolving door of contractors.
I work across the whole picture: understanding what a business actually needs, designing the right technical solution, building it, and then looking after it. Recent work spans enterprise systems design and cloud architecture (Azure, message-based systems, APIs) through to rescuing and modernising long-serving legacy applications. The toolset matters less than the outcome: software that’s reliable, that fits how you really work, and that you’re no longer afraid of.
I’m also known across the wider software world for founding and running PHP North West — for a decade, one of Europe’s most respected developer conferences, bringing hundreds of delegates a year from more than twenty countries to Manchester. Sustaining a community like that for ten years calls for exactly what a good technical partner needs: judgement, follow-through, and the knack of carrying people with you.
The part most developers can’t offer
Before I made my living in software, I trained and practised as an occupational therapist in mental health. It sounds like a detour, but it’s the most useful thing I bring. It taught me to understand people in their real context — to listen properly, to work out what someone actually needs rather than what they first ask for, and to steady people through change that frightens them.
That’s why my projects start with listening, not rebuilding. A struggling business-critical system is rarely just a technical problem; there are people whose working lives depend on it, and decisions and knowledge baked into it that no document captures. Get the human and business understanding right, and the technology becomes the easy part.
In the PHP world you might know me better as phpcodemonkey — a tongue-in-cheek handle I’ve worn for years and won’t be dropping. It’s all the same person: Jeremy Coates, phpcodemonkey and Magma are one and the same.
Magma Software Engineering Ltd is the company I contract through — but you’ll be working with me.
