Emma De Silva
Laravel & PHP Engineer · Creator of HydePHP
I build high-trust systems with beautiful edges.
$ whoami
The developer clients ask for by name.
Laravel specialist with eleven years building for the web. I created
HydePHP - a Laravel-based static site generator with
200,000+ downloads - and have maintained it solo for four years:
architecture, releases, docs, support, community, all of it. I've
contributed to the Laravel framework through open source - notably the highly popular
Number
utility class shipped in a Laravel release - and I speak at Laravel
conferences across Europe. In teams, I'm the engineer who runs discovery,
whiteboards the architecture, explains it in the customer's language - and then ships it.
$ git log --reverse emma/career
Work, one commit at a time.
Earlier years · freelance, production & public projects
- Freelance developer & designer for SMBs and local government - discovery, proposals, pricing, delivery.
- Project lead for an EU Commission youth-engagement initiative, co-hosting a live-broadcast political panel seen by 2,000+ people.
- Executive producer for a US web series. I learned to sell before I learned to scale.
HumLow · Co-founder & CEO
- Technical co-founder of a US startup: shipped production Laravel applications across e-commerce, back-office, and SaaS.
- Ran operations, strategy, and every customer conversation from first discovery call to close.
- Built and operated the company's infrastructure - orchestrated cloud containers and on-prem bare metal, with corporate grade security baked in from day one.
stack: Laravel · PHP · MySQL · Cloudflare · Ubuntu
HydePHP · Creator & Maintainer
- Created and solely maintain a Laravel-based static site generator: 200,000+ downloads, featured in Laravel News and the official Laravel blog.
- Own the entire lifecycle - architecture, releases, documentation, support, community, marketing, and custom CI/CD infrastructure.
- Currently building HydePHP Cloud, a multi-tenant SaaS CMS with live site previews, subdomain routing, a media pipeline, and a secured build & deployment pipeline.
- Open-source contributions to the Laravel framework itself, including the well-received Number utility class.
stack: Laravel · Inertia · Vue · Tailwind · GitHub Actions · Pest
Grebban · Backend Developer (Laravel)
- Built scalable e-commerce APIs and integrations for enterprise headless commerce brands - including a five-company group selling across the Nordics and Germany, whose 600,000+ product catalogue I kept in sync.
- Queue-driven backends on Laravel Horizon, where third-party data ingestion is business-critical and downtime isn't an option.
- De-facto client-facing engineer: led technical discovery and translated business requirements into architecture and honest estimates.
- Mentored across the team - the person other developers came to, from system internals to client meetings.
stack: Laravel · Horizon · MySQL · REST APIs
Your Company · This could be us
The log is ready for its next entry. If you're building something serious in Laravel or PHP and want an engineer who owns systems end to end - let's write it together.
$ history | grep stage
From the stage & the keyboard.
$ composer show --installed
The toolkit.
Core
PHP & Laravel - Horizon, Livewire, Blade, Inertia. MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL. REST API design & third-party integrations at scale.
Frontend
Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Vue, Vite. Enough design sense to ship interfaces people actually enjoy using.
Infrastructure
AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS & more), Ubuntu, Nginx, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions CI/CD - plus self-hosted bare metal.
Quality
Pest / PHPUnit, PHPStan, strict types, atomic Git commits. Highly tested, self-documenting code - secure by default.
$ git remote add
Let's build something together.
I'm based in Malmö, Sweden (CET) and remote-native - I've spent my whole career working with both European and US teams, and I'm comfortable in either timezone. Natively bilingual in English & Swedish, conversational in German. If you're hiring for Laravel or PHP, I'd love to hear what you're building.
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
backend/ | ++++++++++
open-source/ | ++++++++++
team-morale/ | ++++++++++
3 areas changed, 30 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
emma@mbp $ open mailto:[email protected]
Find me elsewhere