{"profile":{"name":"Ben Colonna","title":"Senior Backend Engineer","location":"Nottingham, UK","summary":"Senior backend engineer with 10+ years building and re-architecting scalable web applications. I focus on making systems faster, cheaper and more reliable — from query tuning and profiling to moving monoliths onto event-driven microservices. I work across PHP (Laravel, Symfony), Python (FastAPI, Django) and JavaScript (Vue), and I lead teams, mentor developers and work closely with product and customers. I’m learning TypeScript and NestJS outside of work, and this site is that project: a NestJS backend with its own metrics, health checks and graceful shutdown.","links":[{"label":"LinkedIn","url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-colonna-b9123a222"}]},"impact":[{"metric":"6s → <500ms","label":"Page load time","context":"Query and code optimisation at Navitas"},{"metric":"65%","label":"AWS cost reduction","context":"Over $20k saved moving Adzooma to microservices"},{"metric":"10%","label":"Performance gain","context":"PHP/Laravel and Docker platform upgrade"},{"metric":"15%","label":"Faster deployments","context":"CI/CD pipeline improvements at ClickTech"}],"skills":[{"category":"Languages","items":["PHP","Python","JavaScript","SQL","TypeScript (learning)"]},{"category":"Frameworks","items":["Laravel","Symfony","FastAPI","Django","Vue","Lithium","Yii","NestJS (learning)"]},{"category":"Data","items":["MySQL / MariaDB / Aurora","PostgreSQL","Redis","MongoDB","BigQuery"]},{"category":"Cloud & infrastructure","items":["AWS ECS","Lambda","SQS","RDS","ElastiCache","API Gateway","GCP","Docker","Linux"]},{"category":"Performance & reliability","items":["Query optimisation","Profiling","New Relic","CloudWatch","Log analysis","Cost optimisation","CI/CD"]},{"category":"Quality & tooling","items":["PHPUnit","Pest","PyTest","PHPStan","CS Fixer","Cursor","GitHub Copilot","CodeRabbit","n8n"]}]}