About — Matt Bedford · PHP Software Developer

I work on the parts of websites that have to be correct, not just pretty: the data, the connections between systems, the bits everything else leans on.

Ten years running my own web agency, three years as digital director of the Swiss e-commerce association, then a deliberate move into full-time development. Ten-plus years in, I've sat on every side of a project and that informs how I build: pragmatic, commercially aware, delivered on time.

Most of my work is PHP: fully-customized WordPress themes and plugins, SlimPHP, and Laravel where it fits. I build REST APIs, payment tools and third-party integrations: all with the kind of clean, layered architecture that survives contact with real users.

Lately that's meant serious AI integration: orchestrating several model providers behind one coherent pipeline, layering in the safety and guardrails that make AI trustworthy in production and grounding answers with retrieval-augmented generation and vector search: stuff that users don't have to think about because "it just works".

What I do

Web development, slimline web-apps and platforms that drive business results
Design and build REST APIs and the services behind them
Integrate payments (Stripe, Paypal, Twint, etc), email, storage and third-party platforms
AI integration: multi-model orchestration, safety layers, RAG, vector search
Bespoke WordPress & custom PHP: plugins, customer account areas, SaaS backends
Take projects end-to-end and ship them on time

What I value

Simplicity: reframing and making complexity reliably simple
Safety: guardrails as architecture, not afterthought
Privacy: collect less; respect the people behind the data
Open source: advocate and contributor
Security: zero trust policies, weak points transformed into strengths

Get in touch

Available for backend, integration and AI work as well as custom greenfield development. [email protected] · github.com/mattbedford

Need security or accessibility specifically? I co-founded Hebble & Stone a non-profit enterprise to provide exactly that to small businesses and community-driven organizations.

What do I do when I'm not at the keyboard? Great question! You can see my fine wood-working projects on my personal portfolio site - please take a look if you're interested in what I do outside of the development world.