Bobby Allen

Hey there!

I'm Bobby Allen, a software engineer and ‘full-stack’ web developer from Ipswich, England.

With over twenty years’ experience, I mainly specialise in PHP and building scalable applications using the Laravel framework.

I'm also fond of and have many years of experience using .NET/C# and Python too!

In my recent professional roles, I have mainly been focused on back-end development, systems' integration, automation, and APIs.

Open-source contribution

In my spare time, and as an advocate of open-source software I develop, lead and work on several widely used projects many of which I have been involved with for more than ten years now.

I also enjoy exploring technology and sharing my experiences over at my blog; I generally write guides and articles about Linux, software, IoT, and DevOps.

Authored and maintained projects

Check out some of my open-source and personal projects that I work on in my spare time ->

  • FsHub.io - A free cloud service that provides flight tracking and performance monitoring for flight simulators. The platform tracks and handles ~10k flights every week and on average the queue workers process ~30k jobs per hour.
  • LRM (Landing Rate Monitor) - A Microsoft Windows desktop application (written in C#) that integrates with commercial and consumer-grade flight simulation platforms (FSX, Prepar3d and X-Plane 11); the application sends aircraft system and position status data to the FsHub.io service. LRM Client has been downloaded over 50k times and is used in over 40 countries around the world!
  • Sentora (formally ZPanel) - An open-source web hosting control panel for *NIX, BSD and Microsoft Windows written in PHP.
  • Pirrot - A parrot (Simplex) radio repeater controller for the RaspberryPi.

Authored and maintained open-source libraries

I build and maintain packages too, most of them I developed out of a need for functionality in my own personal or professional projects. As you'd expect these can all be downloaded using Composer and can be found on Packagist ->

  • Cartographer - A library for programmatically constructing GeoJSON objects.
  • Distical - A library for calculating the distance between two or more latitude/longitude coordinates.
  • GPIO -A (G)eneral (P)urpose (I)nput (O)utput library for the RaspberryPi, Use PHP to work with inputs and outputs such as buttons, switches, LED's, motors and relays.
  • Gravel - A Gravatar.com library enabling developers easy access, presentation and manipulation of user avatars in their applications.
  • Linguist - A library designed to extract and manipulate prefixed words in content ideal for working with @mentions, #topics and even custom action tags!
  • Executioner - A PHP library for executing system processes and applications with the ability to pass extra arguments and read CLI output results.
  • Metar - A library to query airport METAR (Meteorological Terminal Aviation Routine Weather Report) information.
  • Plexity - A password complexity checker and enforcement library for PHP.
  • Sluginator - A URL slug creation and sanitisation library.

...a handful of other libraries, API clients and other bits 'n' bobs can be found over on my GitHub profile!