I'm the engineer production problems escalate to.
For the past 3+ years at WPMU DEV / Incsub — the company behind Smush (1M+ active installs), Hummingbird, Defender, Forminator, and SmartCrawl, trusted by 600,000+ sites — my job has been debugging live PHP and WordPress systems I've never seen before. A different stack, host, plugin combination, and failure mode in every case.
Most backend engineers debug one codebase for years. I diagnose root causes across thousands of distinct production systems — performance regressions, WooCommerce checkout failures, plugin conflicts, memory exhaustion, compromised sites.
- Scoped, production-safe fixes (MU-plugins, runtime patches) that stabilize live sites without touching third-party source
- Measured Core Web Vitals gains: LCP/CLS, caching strategy, query optimization, asset delivery
- Code-level bug fixes and PRs into a product suite running on millions of sites
- Security incident response: forensics, cleanup, hardening
- Backend: PHP, Laravel, WordPress, WooCommerce, REST APIs, MySQL
- Tools: WP-CLI, Xdebug, PHPUnit, Composer, Git, Linux, Chrome DevTools
- Frontend: JavaScript, Node.js
- WordPress Core Contributor — credited in the 6.7 release
- Plugin author on WordPress.org
- Arabic Translation Editor for multiple WordPress ecosystem projects
- Featured at State of the Word 2024
- Creator of PHP/Laravel courses on a 250,000+ learner platform
- LinkedIn: ali16ali
- WordPress: profiles.wordpress.org/ali7ali
- Stack Overflow: ali-ali
- Website: ali-ali.org
- YouTube: Learn with Ali Ali
10+ years in software engineering. PHP & Laravel primary. Based in Dubai, UAE. Open to remote or relocation worldwide.