A beardy man in his late 30s, wearing a comfy jumper, upside down

About Stef

I'm Stef. I run Chobble CIC from Prestwich, Manchester. I've been building websites for a living since the mid-2000s, and I care deeply about doing it honestly, transparently, and in a way that genuinely helps the people who hire me. This page is the long version, but if you want the short version, read my CV or get in touch.

How I got here

Bouncy Castle Network (2009–2019)

I was the lead developer and the public face of Bouncy Castle Network, a SaaS platform for bouncy castle hirers. I was there from the first customer, growing to over 1,000 by the time I moved on. It's now the leading bouncy castle booking system by a long shot (and it may surprise you to learn there are a few great options!).

Because I dealt with customers over chat or the phone every day, I had a very tight feedback loop: someone would hit a wall with their site, I'd build the feature to solve it, and then a week later I'd teach the next customer how to use it. I built tools into the platform to help hirers market their sites, build backlinks, write better content, get insights into their bookings, and generally compete against much larger national operators.

I was also obsessed with performance. Each customer's site had to score highly on Google Lighthouse, have proper sitemaps, clean structured markup, and load fast enough to convert visitors who'd clicked through from Google. A lot of what I now do as SEO consultancy is work I've been doing operationally for small businesses since 2009.

Bandcamp (2019–2024)

I joined Bandcamp.com as a senior developer on the payments team. It's a site that handles roughly $200 million a year in payments to independent artists, and the payments code is the kind of work where the cost of a bug is real money landing in the wrong place. I worked on the fiddly stuff, like reconciling stuck PayPal transactions, double-entry accounting, and recovering money that had got caught between systems. That job taught me a lot about how to write code that has to be right the first time.

From there I moved to the growth team, which is where I got deep into SEO at scale. We fixed slow and broken pages by optimising SQL and removing long-standing bugs, then worked on site-wide SEO improvements: performance, metadata, and JSON-LD structured data. The team then rebuilt the mobile layout from a monolithic application into a set of small, targeted services focused on performance. The mobile site ended up dramatically faster and more pleasant to use.

I was also the "support dev". I built a dashboard inside Bandcamp's Helpscout interface, migrated the support team from Fogbugz to Helpscout to Zendesk, and shipped quality-of-life fixes for the team that handled customer issues.

A few Bandcampy things I'm proud of: I proposed and implemented the easter egg where paying £6.66 for an item shows the metal horns 🤘 (and £4.20 shows a tree 🌳, among others), helped on Bandcamp's carbon offsetting for company meet-ups, and I supported the unionisation efforts of my US colleagues.

Bandcamp was bought by Epic Games, and then sold to Songtradr. There were huge layoffs and I lost all my support team buddies, but I survived. I handed in my notice in November 2024 because the company I'd joined - an independent, underground business - no longer existed. It was now part of "the industry". And so I set about freelancing full-time, and Chobble was born.

Charities and community work (2011–present)

Alongside paid work I've been supporting charities and community groups for 14+ years, including Blue Pits Housing Action, Vegan Prestwich (which I run with my wife), Crumpsall Folk Club, and others. This is where a lot of my patience for explaining technical things to non-technical people comes from. It's also where I learned that most charities are running on software and hosting that's far more expensive, fragile, and locked-in than it needs to be.

What I'm good at

  • Technical SEO and site performance - Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, structured data, sitemaps, crawlability. Most agencies focus on content; I focus on the foundation everything else sits on.
  • Ruby - Bandcamp's codebase is Ruby (not Rails), and I've worked on both huge Ruby applications at scale and smaller Rails apps that just need to reliably do one thing.
  • Deno on the edge - my ticketing platform is a Deno app compiled with esbuild and deployed to Bunny.net's edge scripting runtime. No server to maintain, scales automatically, fast everywhere.
  • Eleventy and static sites - The Chobble Template is an open-source Eleventy-based system I've used to build most of the sites in my examples. Fast, cheap to host, no attack surface, fully portable.
  • Payments, reconciliation, and systems that have to be right - from Bandcamp.
  • Helping non-technical people understand their website - from 15+ years of doing it.

What I won't pretend to be

  • Certified. I don't have Microsoft certs, Google certs, or a degree in computer science. I'm not opposed to certifications in principle, but I've met plenty of certified developers who were poor at the job and plenty of uncertified ones who were excellent. My results and history speak for themselves. If that's not enough for you, I'm probably not the right person, and that's fine.
  • A social media marketer. I'll tell you what I know about SEO and content, but if you want somebody to run your TikTok, hire somebody who runs TikToks.
  • An agency. It's just me. If that's a problem for you, I can introduce you to people I trust who work at agencies.

My values

I run Chobble as a Community Interest Company with an asset lock, which means any surplus has to be reinvested into community-interest work rather than extracted as private profit. I'm an anarchist, which in practice means I don't believe in bosses, including myself as the boss of whoever's reading this. I publish my opinions as opinions, not as pronouncements. If I'm wrong about something, tell me and I'll update.

I donate 10% of what I earn to the Against Malaria Foundation, publish my code openly, and try to recommend competitors when they'd suit a client better than I would.

Where else I am

Get in touch

If any of the above sounds like the kind of person you want building or fixing your website, drop me a message. I reply to everything, even if it's just to say I'm not the right fit.