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About Hari KT — Freelance Full Stack Developer from Kerala, India

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I am Hari KT, a freelance full stack developer based in Kerala, India—God’s own country. I work remotely with clients around the world, from solo founders validating a first idea to established teams who need an extra pair of experienced hands.

I have been writing PHP since 2006 and publishing what I learn on this site since 2012.

What I do
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I take products across the whole stack rather than a single slice of it—database design, backend APIs, frontend interfaces, and deployment. In practice that means a client can hand over a problem instead of a task list.

Backend. PHP is my core expertise, alongside Golang, Python and NodeJS. I have worked with most of the major PHP frameworks and, more often, with decoupled standalone components composed into exactly what a project needs. On the Python side I build APIs with FastAPI and handle web scraping and data extraction with Scrapy.

Frontend and mobile. ReactJS on the web, React Native for Android and iOS, and Tauri for cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, macOS and Linux. Because these share a common React foundation, I can take one product to web, desktop and mobile without handing it to a different team for each platform.

AI-assisted development. I use AI tooling for rapid prototyping and to move from idea to working software faster.

Frameworks and libraries I work with
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PHP — Laravel (including Eloquent), Symfony, CakePHP and its standalone ORM, CodeIgniter, Slim, Silex, Aura, and Zend Framework / Laminas and Zend Expressive. For persistence and templating: Doctrine, Twig and Plates.

Golang — Fiber and Beego for HTTP services and APIs.

Python — FastAPI for APIs, Scrapy for web scraping and data extraction.

JavaScript — ReactJS, React Native, and NodeJS.

CMS and e-commerce — Magento and ProcessWire.

Servers and deployment — I set up and maintain the infrastructure my applications run on: Nginx as web server and reverse proxy, HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt certificates and automated renewal, along with the day-to-day Linux server administration that keeps a site healthy.

I am comfortable moving between these rather than tied to any one of them. Much of my work involves composing decoupled, framework-agnostic components—an approach shaped by years on Aura—so the tool fits the problem instead of the other way round. You will find hands-on posts about many of these under frameworks and architecture.

Open source
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Maintainer of Aura for PHP
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I am one of the maintainers of Aura for PHP, the framework and library collection created by Paul M Jones—a prominent figure in the PHP community, author of Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP, and well known for his work on PHP framework benchmarking and performance.

Aura’s packages are fully decoupled and dependency-free, so each one works standalone or composes into a complete framework. I have contributed code, documentation and releases across the project for over a decade, and a good deal of the writing on this blog grew out of that work.

Composer support for ProcessWire
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I built a Composer installer for ProcessWire modules, bringing proper dependency management to a CMS that had been installing third-party modules by hand. The work was picked up and referenced by the ProcessWire team in their own blog post, Composer, Google Calendars and ProcessWire.

I wrote up the approach here in Composer Support for ProcessWire Modules and a follow-up covering repositories without a composer.json—see everything under ProcessWire.

Elsewhere
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Beyond Aura and ProcessWire, I advocate for open source generally and give back through code, documentation and financial support of the projects I depend on.

Products I have built
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Writing and speaking
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I write here about PHP, frameworks, Composer, APIs, and software architecture—you can browse everything by topic or by date. I also share my coding journey on my YouTube channel.

Work with me
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I am available for freelance and contract work. If you are building something and think I can help, I would genuinely like to hear about it.