Chopstik Internet is run by Tony Coyle, a.k.a Chopper - the noodle munching code monkey making cracker web apps in the winterless north of Aotearoa New Zealand!
Who am I and a bit of my philosophy
I'm a full-stack web application developer with close to 30 years of software development, marketing communications and leadership experience.
When it comes to technology, my primary passion is writing code, or more specifically, crafting solutions to technical problems and challenges that companies face.
In my early career, I completed a Bachelor of Business (Marketing/Management) degree from Auckland University of Technology and worked for various marketing communications agencies (Pearson Davis, Lowe, Ammirati Puris Lintas) in their nascent online/digital departments.
After graduating and spending a year with IBM New Zealand, I emmigrated to London to work with APL Digital & Zentropy Partners before going on to co-found mTicket®, Europe's first mobile ticketing application in 2000 using WAP & SMS technologies.
I'm based in Helena Bay, on Northland’s east coast and in my personal life I volunteer with Coastguard New Zealand. I'm a qualified Master with the Whangaruru Coastguard unit and also the Unit Training Officer responsible for helping our volunteers move through the Coastguard curriculum and getting the best out of the crew as we assist the public that get into difficulty at sea.
When I’m not coding, I’ll either have a dive tank strapped to my back underwater or I’ll be dreaming up new ways to cook things over charcoal.
And why the name Chopstik?
Well, it's a long story. It started with testicular cancer in the early 90's when the nickname Chopper was coined. Throw in 25 kilos of sushi rice won at a Pearson Davis Friday night social and the nickname morphed into Chopstik. Completely ignoring Rob Davis' advice to keep brand names spelt correctly and the rest is history - here's some of that...
Past career experiences
Development skills & programming technologies
I've many years experience working with object oriented MVC PHP frameworks, predominately Laravel & CakePHP. I’ve experience with all the usual full-stack tools and languages; HTML5, CSS3, SQL & Javascript. I’ve good experience with the Angular & Express JS frameworks as well as comprehensive experience with Amazon Web Services; CI/CD/DevOps, security best practices, infrastructure deployment and management.
I use Docker for containerisation and am constantly using git, PHPUnit, MariaDB/MySQL/Aurora/Sqlite. My Laravel frontend experience is focused on Livewire & AlpineJS rather than VueJS. I've experience with Puppeteer to build 'automated workers' as well as using the Ionic framework (Angular + AWS Amplify) for mobile applications.
