Zachary Claret-Scott

Conker Group turns real-time point-of-sale data from UK retailers into insights for FMCG brands and their national account teams, within minutes of the data arriving.

The codebase is PHP 8.4 with ETL pipelines at its core, running on AWS with EC2 Mac instances and Vagrant for local environments, and I use Claude Code and MCP servers day to day.

I focus on data import at scale, building the pipelines that bring in millions of data points a day, and led the migration of the legacy codebase from PHP 5.3 to 8.4. Alongside that I built the team's reproducible development environment, look after the macOS estate and its egress proxy, and ran an internal security audit and penetration test, fixing what it found including several GDPR gaps. Agentic coding is part of how I work, and I build MCP servers for internal tools, designing each tool's interface and response shape to keep token usage low, plus automated AI passes for code review and data analysis.

Origin Amenity Solutions supplies turf care and plant health products to greenkeepers, grounds managers, and local authorities across the UK. It also owns MachineKeeper, a SaaS platform for equipment inspections, and the legacy TurfKeeper platform, which together serve thousands of golf courses across Europe and tens of thousands of users.

I built on Laravel and FilamentPHP with MySQL, wrote the mobile app in Flutter for iOS and Android, and ran the infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform across Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare, with Sentry for error tracking.

I built MachineKeeper from concept to launch as the sole developer, owning the architecture and product roadmap and reporting into the leadership team. In parallel I upgraded TurfKeeper's PHP stack and migrated it from unmanaged Azure VMs onto infrastructure as code in Google Cloud.

Flo provides recruitment software, payroll, back-office services, and invoice financing to UK temporary recruitment agencies across healthcare, education, industrial, and construction.

The platform is Laravel and FilamentPHP on PHP 8.1 with MySQL, running on 180 VMs in AWS managed with Ansible, with Git and CI/CD pipelines in front of it.

I joined as Tech Lead to bring development in-house, replacing a 7-person agency team with 3 internal engineers. I took ownership of the pipelines, deployment workflows, and dev environments, refactored critical legacy code while taking the platform from PHP 5.2 to 8.1, and ran the team day to day through standups, code review, and mentoring, with regular stakeholder meetings to carry business decisions back to the engineers.

Claret-Scott & Co is my own consultancy, building bespoke web and mobile applications for UK businesses. It is also the company behind enhost, the award-winning web hosting business I have run since 2016.

I build on PHP 8 and Laravel with Livewire, Vue.js, and Flutter on the front end, PHPUnit for testing, Redis and Horizon for queues, and MySQL, all running on Proxmox and LXC managed with Terraform and NixOS.

I take projects from requirements through to delivery, and increasingly build AI automated workflows and MCP integrations for clients, including branded in-app chatbots driven by custom system prompting. enhost runs on infrastructure I manage end to end.

Probably Rational was the software agency I founded at university and grew to an award-winning 9-person team, building privacy focused mobile and web apps for clients across the UK and USA.

We built on PHP, Laravel, and MySQL with Flutter for mobile, running on Docker in AWS.

As lead architect and business director I ran the operation from client acquisition through to hands-on development and delivery. Privacy and GDPR were designed into everything we built, I took several clients through Cyber Essentials certification on their software, and several graduates began their careers there.

The first million decimal digits of π, set out as a short mathematical paper rather than a wall of text, on a domain that is itself π to thirty-two places.

A Terraform provider for SMTP2GO, so sending domains, SMTP users, API keys and webhooks are declared in code rather than clicked together in a dashboard. In development and not yet published.

An off-the-shelf weather station turned into a time-series archive: readings pulled into VictoriaMetrics every five minutes and read through two Grafana dashboards that set my garden against my dad's station on the other side of the village, and against government river and air quality feeds.

Secret Santa without the spreadsheet. Set up a gift exchange in under a minute, invite people by link or QR, draw the matches with one button, and let everyone message each other anonymously through to the day.

A developer toolkit for short links, deep links and a growing set of small hosted tools, all sharing one tenancy model, custom-domain system and REST API. It is the platform the rest of my web tools are built on.

Mirrors another Last.fm user's listening onto your own profile, live. Point it at a friend, a UK radio station or any Icecast stream and every track they play gets scrobbled to you for as long as you choose.

A countdown to the next Student Finance England payment, laid out as a spiral-bound student planner with the term dates ticked off as they land.

A shared ball pit in the browser. Everyone online is a ball, one of them is it, and touching someone passes it on. A university game jam idea from 2015, rebuilt from scratch a decade later.

A daily paper that reduces the front pages of five British national newspapers to the three colours that covered most of them, with each day's splash headline read off the same scans.

Three Proxmox nodes across two locations, provisioned with OpenTofu and configured with Ansible and NixOS. It runs the things I use every day and doubles as the place I prove out infrastructure changes before they touch anything I run for other people.

I own the club website and the online merch store, contribute to decisions on branding, and help with social media. I also help run the club's events, marshalling across rally weekends and working the setup for all three annual rallies — putting up tents, building controls, and running bars — which I did as an ordinary member for a year before joining the committee.

I serve as a poll worker for all local and national elections, including council elections, general elections, and police commissioner elections. My responsibilities include verifying voter identification, ensuring ballots are completed correctly and securely deposited, assisting members of the public with the voting process, and managing the setup and closing procedures of the polling station.

I serve on the Independent Remuneration Panel, which meets annually to review and recommend councillor allowances and special responsibility payments. I work collaboratively with fellow panel members to ensure fair remuneration that aligns with surrounding council peers and reflects the responsibilities of elected officials. This role involves analysing comparative data, deliberating on appropriate allowance levels, and producing formal recommendations to the council.

The society had folded before I arrived, so I re-founded it and ran it for two years. It grew to over 60 members with around 300 on the online chat, on a programme of weekly events — hackathons and hands-on technical workshops. I handed over a committee structure that kept it running after I left.

Taken alongside full-time work, to formalise the networking and distributed-systems knowledge I had picked up in practice. Includes Azure certification prep: AZ-900, AZ-104, DP-900 and AI-900.

I specialised in Robotic Systems in my final year. My dissertation was on fault-tolerant communication protocols for autonomous robots in unreliable field environments, keeping systems working when connectivity drops and things go wrong.

Additional work alongside my degree, separate from my own dissertation. I helped plan the idea, but my main contribution was building the prototype that tested it: a mobile app where students signed up, entered their topics of interest and project ideas, and matched with staff Tinder-style. Allocation then ran as a single matching pass that took every student's and supervisor's preferences into account, replacing a manual process. I presented the paper on stage at the conference myself.

I have a passion for photography, particularly in capturing the beauty of nature and landscapes. I enjoy experimenting with different lighting conditions and techniques to create stunning images.

I'm into strategy and co-op board games. It's how I spend most evenings with friends and family.

I build and detail model railway layouts. It's the one hobby where I get to do something physical with my hands instead of staring at a screen.