Stephen Ward

I am a full stack web developer and Acquia-certified Drupal expert with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling high-performance websites. I specialize in leveraging Drupal 8+ to create robust, secure, and engaging digital experiences. My expertise spans the full development lifecycle, from architecting complex solutions and developing custom modules to optimizing performance and implementing seamless integrations. I thrive on solving challenging technical problems and delivering impactful results for clients and organizations.

Top Skills

• Content Management Systems (CMS) – 15 years of experience site building in Drupal 6 through 11. 10 years of experience site building in WordPress.
• Back-End Development – Extensive LAMP stack experience building custom Drupal modules and WordPress plugins with objected-oriented PHP 7 / 8 and MariaDB / MySQL databases. In-depth knowledge of Composer, Drush, Symfony components, content modeling, performance optimization, and security best practices. Expert in RESTful API design and integration, including Swagger / OpenAPI documentation and Postman collections.
• Front-End Development – 23 years of experience with HTML5, CSS3 / Sass, JavaScript (JS), and jQuery, predominantly converting Figma and Adobe Photoshop designs into responsive themes for Drupal and WordPress. Expert knowledge of Twig templates, Views, and decoupled / headless experiences with AJAX. Recent training with the React and Playwright frameworks.
• DevOps / Server Administration – Maintained a continuous deployment (CD) pipeline for 350+ Drupal websites on Pantheon, as well as a dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 server. Built a ChatOps Slackbot with NodeJS, ExpressJS, and DynamoDB. Comfortable with bash / shell scripting, SSH, and the Linux command line.
• Collaborative Development – Comfortable with modern development workflows in a team environment using tools like VS Code and Docker containers / DDEV for local development, Git for version control, and Jira for issue management. Passionate about consistent code standards, attention to detail, clear communication, and thorough documentation.
• Search Marketing – 3 years of experience in search engine optimization (SEO), including knowledge of Google Analytics, keyword research, lead generation, and pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Yahoo Ads.