Chris Collins
Senior Software Engineer at STV NewsGlasgow
I work across STV News' websites, apps and infrastructure. Most of my day-to-day is PHP, Laravel, WordPress, JavaScript and AWS.
I spend a lot of time building and maintaining the systems behind STV News, from mobile apps and publishing tools to deployments and platform infrastructure.
Lately I've been working on:
- Rewriting APIs spec-first with OpenAPI
- Infrastructure as code and spec-driven development
- Accepting that AI is now part of the whole process, from design to deploy
- Toying with Swift and native iOS and Mac builds using AI
- Building small tools and products outside of work
I enjoy solving practical problems, simplifying messy systems, and building things that are straightforward to maintain long term.
Outside work I'm usually running, hiking, or tinkering with side projects.
Projects
STV News Platform
The platform behind STV News, from the infrastructure and APIs to the editorial experience and the website.
- PHP
- TypeScript
- React
- +7
Apple News Syndication
A simple service that automatically gets STV News articles into Apple News, and keeps them up to date.
- Apple News Format
Social Image Generator
An internal tool that turns published stories into on-brand social images in seconds.
- Canvas
workon
One command to jump back into any project, with tmux, Claude Code and lazygit ready to go.
- Bash
- tmux
- fzf
- +2
West Highland Way Tracker
An app for walking the West Highland Way, starting with a sandbox that gets the route maths right.
- JavaScript
- MapLibre GL JS
- Turf.js
- +1
Chassis CSS
Arnold Clark's CSS framework, built to bring consistency to digital products running on very different stacks.
- CSS
- Sass
Notes
This week I bought an iPod Classic 4th Generation (Mono) and I’m planning on daily driving it. It might seem a strange thing to do, but hear me out.
Taylor Otwell is right that a day is a reasonable default estimate. But not because of vibe coding.
Features belong in plugins, not themes. But on a single in-house site, maybe the theme should just be the application.
EmDash is a genuinely clever piece of engineering. It's also a Cloudflare infrastructure pitch dressed up as a WordPress replacement, and those are very different things.
In 2018 I wrote about moving to plain text to escape note app churn. In 2026, I am still there. Finder, a single working directory, dated Markdown files, and MarkEdit as a thin editor over real files on disk. No systems to maintain, no plugins to tune. It works even better in an AI-heavy workflow.
The bar to start a project is gone, but the bar to maintain it hasn't.
A lot of the modern web stack quietly pushes you into SaaS funnels and tight vendor lock-in
I’ve archived my old Eleventy starter. It served me well for years, but I don’t use it anymore.
For years, I've been thinking about how we store and access our digital files, especially photos.