I'm a Full Stack Web Developer specialising in WordPress engineering and API-driven applications — building systems designed to be maintainable, scalable, and long-lived.
I came to the industry via gym management during the lockdown years, and have since worked deeply across PHP, JavaScript (React), SQL, and modern WordPress architecture — from custom themes and Gutenberg blocks to backend systems, integrations, and performance optimisation.
My focus is on backend-heavy work that improves and evolves existing systems: refactoring, standards compliance, edge cases, and the architectural decisions that make future development faster and safer.
I’m particularly interested in:
- Backend-heavy WordPress development
- Custom plugins and Gutenberg blocks
- API design and system architecture
- Tooling, automation, and developer experience
- Building products alongside client work
Course Atlas is a full-stack golf course discovery platform built with an API-first architecture.
It's designed to help users explore, filter, and evaluate golf courses through a performant, map-first interface, while maintaining a clean separation between frontend and backend systems.
- Designing and building a production-ready Laravel API
- Creating a map-first frontend using Next.js and Leaflet
- Implementing geospatial filtering and search (bounds + radius)
- Structuring and validating large JSON datasets for ingestion
- Building authentication flows (Google SSO + session-based auth)
- Applying security and performance considerations (rate limiting, payload separation, caching strategies)
- Designing for multi-platform consumption (web-first, mobile-ready API)
- Modelling stateful business processes (claim lifecycle with audit trail)
- Implementing AI governance policies at the data layer
- Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React, Tailwind
- Backend: Laravel (API-first), Sanctum authentication
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Mapping: Leaflet / OpenStreetMap
- Admin: Filament (internal tooling)
- Testing: Playwright (E2E critical-path coverage)
- Map-based discovery with clustering and dynamic bounds querying
- Advanced filtering (course type, holes, slope range, facilities)
- Structured listing pages across courses, golf shops, and virtual venues
- Course claiming workflow — submission, admin review, approval, and revocation with full audit trail
- User accounts with saved courses and custom lists
- JSON-driven data ingestion pipeline with validation tooling
- Versioned API (
/api/v1) for long-term stability
- API-first design with strict frontend/backend separation
- JSON-canonical + DB-projection pattern — JSON is the source of truth; the database is a runtime projection, with a sync log to reconcile divergence after workflow events
- AI enrichment governance layer — per-listing
ai_automation_levelcontrols (unrestricted/human_review_required/locked) gate automated data enrichment and PR creation - Independent endpoints for map data vs list data (performance optimisation)
- Snapshot-based state restoration for map/search UX
- CLI tooling for dataset validation, completeness scoring, enrichment, and sync management
- Secure redirect handling and sanitised external linking
- API key authentication and external developer access
- Course comparison feature
- Affiliate integrations (booking and equipment)
- Public API documentation (auto-generated via Scribe)
- Frontend: Course Atlas
A lightweight WordPress plugin for correctly handling permanently removed URLs using HTTP 410 responses — with thousands of active installs and actively maintained to WordPress standards.
- Actively maintained
- Thousands of active installs
- Focused on correctness, simplicity, and WordPress standards
👉 https://github.com/XanderCalvert/410-for-WordPress
I'm currently developing Course Atlas into a production-ready platform, while building out the technical foundation for a small product-focused web agency — with a reusable WordPress toolkit, improved testing and deployment workflows, and a long-term goal of building products alongside client work.
