I am Alex from the Netherlands 🇳🇱 . I am a developer with a focus on Laravel and a passion for infrastructure.

My passion projects currently have to do with WebSockets, GraphQL and error insights and you might have seen me in the issues for projects like Lighthouse (GraphQL server for Laravel) and Soketi (self-hosted Pusher compatible WebSocket server written in JavaScript) and many other projects.

My "day job" is a freelance developer, supporting small and large businesses with their PHP / Laravel applications and infrastructure challenges. A (public) part of this is my work in the PHP SDKs team @ Sentry (Sentry is an application monitoring tool to debug errors with the context needed to solve bugs). Full disclosure, my Sentry WordPress plugin is my own project and not officially endorsed or supported by Sentry.

Over the years I started many (MANY) side-projects, some better than others but all to scratch my own itch or to build a product I myself would like to use in my day-to-day work. I am "collecting" these tools @ Chief Tools. Some of the tools are open source or have open source components, all are built with (mostly) Laravel. Learn more about it here.

Whenever I find something cool or something I feel like I wanted to know when I started researching I try to make a blog post @ alex.bouma.blog (although there is not as much content as there should be yet).

If I've helped you with code, guides or some good suggestions I'd appreciate you letting me know by buying my a cup of coffee ☕ or a pizza 🍕 (I LOVE pizza)!