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Daniel Lambert Rawrsome Designs

Available for freelance & contract work

Web Developer · United Kingdom

22 years of shipping the web. Still not extinct.

I'm Daniel Lambert — a freelance web developer who has been building for the web since 2004, from table layouts and dial-up through to Laravel and edge caching. I build things that work, keep working, and can still be changed three years later.

Start a project See the fossil record
Years in the industry
22+
Building for the web
Since 2004
Case studies written up
0
Asteroids dodged
1

About

I've watched the web change three or four times.

That is the useful part. Not the specific technologies — those keep moving — but knowing which decisions you regret in year three.

I started building websites in 2004, when layouts were made of tables, JavaScript was something you apologised for, and a surprising amount of the job was testing in a browser that no longer exists. I moved to standards-based CSS, then jQuery, then the first real PHP frameworks, then Laravel — and each time, the thing that mattered was not the tooling but whether the result could still be maintained after I left.

Somewhere in the middle of that I spent a stretch working outside the industry. It is the reason most of my back catalogue is offline: clients were acquired, businesses closed, domains lapsed, and nobody archives a trade portal. I can't hand you a list of live URLs. What I can do is show you exactly how each of those projects was reasoned about — which is the part that transfers anyway.

These days I work with Laravel and a deliberately small frontend stack. I take on new builds, rebuilds of things that have aged badly, and codebases somebody else abandoned. I am equally happy being the only developer or the one who gets a team unstuck.

Capabilities

What I'm actually good at

A short list I can stand behind, rather than a wall of logos.

Laravel & modern PHP

Application work in Laravel — domain modelling, queues, background jobs, APIs, and the boring reliability work that keeps them up. Comfortable in a codebase I did not write.

Laravel PHP 8.4 MySQL / PostgreSQL Redis Queues & scheduling PHPUnit

Frontend that holds up

Semantic HTML, CSS that does not fight you in a year, and only as much JavaScript as the job actually needs. Accessible and fast by default, not as a later pass.

HTML & CSS Tailwind CSS Vanilla JS Alpine.js WCAG 2.2 AA Core Web Vitals

Legacy rescue

Inherited systems with no tests, no docs, and no original author. I have spent a good part of twenty years making these safe to change again, without a big-bang rewrite.

Codebase audits Characterisation tests Incremental refactoring Data migration Handover & documentation

How I work

No surprises, in either direction

Twenty years of client work distilled into four things I do on every project.

  1. 01

    Understand the actual problem

    The brief is rarely the problem. Before writing anything I want to see how the work happens today — the spreadsheet, the phone call, the workaround everyone has stopped noticing.

  2. 02

    Agree what "done" means

    Written scope, a fixed price or a clear day rate, and a defined first milestone. You should never be surprised by an invoice or a timeline.

  3. 03

    Ship in visible slices

    Working software on a staging URL early and often, so you are reacting to something real rather than approving a document.

  4. 04

    Hand over properly

    Tests, a runbook, and a walkthrough with whoever inherits it. My best projects are the ones that stopped needing me.

Got something that needs building — or rescuing?

Tell me what you are trying to do and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it. No pitch deck, no discovery retainer.

Send me an enquiry

Usually replies within one working day.