Blog

Celebrating 10 years with Jamie

19 May 2025

May saw the ten year anniversary of Jamie joining the team, having started back in 2015 he’s overseen and informed many changes — Fusions wouldn’t be Fusions without him!

The team met up to celebrate and had a great time reminiscing about Jamie's history with PHP over coffee and lunch.

Welcome Jack

1 November 2024

In November we welcomed our newest member of the team, Jack!

With experience in Laravel, Python, React Native and Vue he really is a Jack of all trades. We can't wait to see how he settles in to the team!

Congratulations Jamie!

1 September 2024

We’re excited to announce that Jamie has been promoted to Development Manager!

Having been a member of Fusions for nearly 10 years, Jamie has been instrumental in driving improvements across the team. Whether discussing the future in our dedicated 'learning' chat or digging through legacy code like a digital archaeologist, Jamie brings sharp thinking, calm leadership, and just the right amount of sarcasm.

This promotion is a well-deserved recognition of not only his technical brilliance, but also his ability to make even the toughest problems feel solvable (and occasionally, even fun) — we’re lucky to have him!

Saying goodbye...

28 June 2024

Liam has worked his magic here one last time — not just in PHP, but in bringing sharp solutions and good humour to the team.

We’ll miss his sleight of hand in planning poker (and in code reviews), and wish him every success in the next chapter of his journey.

Farewell jQuery

9 February 2024

Following on from our hackathon last year, where we significantly modernised our front-end tests, we’ve been busy modernising the front-end code that our customers use every day.

We’ve managed to (almost!) eliminate our jQuery dependency, benefiting users due to improved performance, and helping our remote-working team by having one fewer thing to maintain. We expect our last couple of usages to fall away by the Summer.

For more background on this change, see how GOV.UK benefited when they removed jQuery too.

Welcome Sam

1 November 2023

Today we welcomed Sam to team Fusions, bringing his widely varied experience to help us solve problems in code and communication.

Joining our remote-working team as we refine and optimise our way into an AI future, he was up and running in no time at all – thanks to our well-maintained and meticulously documented codebase.

Being used to working remotely, Sam’s enjoying the opportunity to learn and collaborate with an established team of developers working on a robust long-term project.

Annual hackathon retreat

21 November 2022

For the second year running, we headed to the outskirts of Oakham for our annual hackathon retreat. Luckily, the power cut didn’t interrupt our curry!

The team made great progress on our migration to Laravel. We’ve been exploring and planning the move for some time now, so it was useful to focus on this project to improve the maintainability of our codebase.

Remote working FTW!

1 June 2020

We made the decision way back in 2010 to work 100% remotely, so we’ve been able to continue as normal these past few months.

Obviously, we look forward to meeting up again in person and to visiting customers.

Welcome Dan

25 June 2019

We recently welcomed Dan to team Fusions, bringing with him over twenty years of experience in web programming.

Joining our remote-working team as we expand to take on new projects, he was up and running in no time at all – exploring new technologies that’ll form the foundation of our next-generation PIM solution.

Used to working remotely, creating specifications and building solutions for clients big and small, Dan’s enjoying the chance to learn and collaborate with an established team of developers working on a robust long-term project.

Annual hackathon retreat

12 September 2018

At least once a year, the Fusions team get together for something more special than our usual monthly meetups. In the past, we’ve ventured to the Dutch PHP conference, and been regulars at the annual PHPNW event in Manchester until the organisers took a well-earned break this year.

This time around, we spent a few days in the wonderful Lincolnshire countryside. We put aside our long-term roadmap and played around with those "what if we?" ideas. Good fun, and — best of all, every idea ultimately made it into production code, with the team hackathon agreed as an annual essential! :-)

Preparations for GDPR

3 May 2018

As 25 May approaches — the date on which the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force — we’ve released several changes to help our customers (data controllers in GDPR-speak!) manage their users within Fusions:
・Job titles/descriptions for users weren’t necessary, so have been removed
・Users have improved visibility of their details and how to amend them
・Details of users without associated data can be deleted rather than archived
・Users can better see and manage which email alerts they’re subscribed to

Our move to PaaS

14 August 2017

After six months of planning, development and (a lot!) of testing, Fusions is now entirely hosted on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture. This brings us immediate benefits in terms of robustness and development focus, plus ensures future scalability.

Several years back, we (along with everyone else) moved to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS or “cloud servers”), where virtual servers are treated as a rented utility without the need to deal with hardware. PaaS is the next evolutionary step along, and ensures we no longer need to deal with the operating system or software packages. Instead, we now leave all the installation/configuration/maintenance fun to a team of experts who take care of managing, securing and optimising a rock-solid platform for us to build upon.

We’re now able to focus our energies entirely on the application level, assured that everything below is in safe hands.

Scaling up for increased volumes of data, or heavy processing is now just a matter of a couple of clicks. And all with the usual top-notch security, data isolation and so on just as before.

PHPNW16 conference

1 October 2016

The Fusions team recently attended another fantastic PHP conference. This year (we make a point of doing this annually), we headed north to Manchester for PHPNW16 for a long weekend of tutorials, the best speakers in the PHP community and beyond, plus a couple of social events.

Of particular interest this year was the Continuously delivering talk – something we feel we’re close to, but are now looking to push towards more fully!

Pizza hackathon time

27 October 2016

Our entire team work remotely, meeting up in person every week or two for an informal get-together and chat. We also meet more formally to groom, estimate and plan our next sprint.

Occasionally though, we visit clients to get everyone in one room and tackle an upcoming challenge. To help Asda with some taxing category reorganisation needs, we all met up for white-board and pizza-powered thinking!

Dutch PHP conference

26 June 2015

Keeping up to date with new developments and improving our PHP skills is something we all continuously work hard at. It’s good to take some dedicated time for this too, and attending a conference is a great way to learn and meet others in the great PHP community we’re lucky to be a part of.

A couple of “Wow, that’s a great idea and quick to do!” changes are already making our lives easier, and the team came away feeling energised and full of inspiration for Fusions improvements to come …