Senior PHP and Moodle contractor, 15+ years. Plugin architecture, system integrations, large-scale migrations and Flutter mobile apps — for universities, training providers and product teams across the UK, Spain and the Nordics.
Joe Cape, M.A., M.Sc. · Málaga, Spain · working in English and Spanish
I'm a developer first — the person you bring in when the default install isn't enough, the integration is half-working, or a migration has to happen without downtime.
Custom Moodle plugins designed to survive upgrades. mod_goodhabits is in the public plugin directory; an enrolment plugin I built for a Totara-based product in 2015 was still core to it in 2023.
SSO, REST and GraphQL APIs, Salesforce and HR system connections, and large-scale platform migrations — including one of 800,000 users and several million enrolments.
Flutter apps for iOS and Android, built alongside your LMS or standalone. Squiddity is my own, live in both app stores.
Stack: PHP (Moodle, Totara, Laravel, Symfony, Zend, Joomla!) · MySQL / PostgreSQL · REST & GraphQL · Flutter / Dart · Vue · React · Docker · AWS · Linux/Apache · Git & CI/CD · PRINCE2 Practitioner
The pattern that matters most in this work isn't the launch — it's what the system looks like five years later.
Engineered the technical solution for large LMS migrations for Swedish regional government, including one of 800,000 users and several million enrolments. Built an enrolment plugin in 2015 that I maintained and extended until 2023, by which point it was a core part of the product. On one upgrade the client credited my code quality for development hours coming in significantly under estimate.
An actively used activity plugin in the official Moodle plugin directory — designed, built and maintained by me. If you want to read my code before hiring me, start here.
View on moodle.org →Built the organisation's original Moodle system in 2011 — work the client credited in part for winning Start Up Social Enterprise of the Year in 2012. Fifteen years on they're still running it as a core income stream, and I still advise on it. Their summary is that it 'just works' with minimal maintenance.
Managed a major platform upgrade, course rollover and archiving cycle synchronised with a Windows Server migration, for a campus of 12,000+ students and 1,800 staff. Load-tested with JMeter to keep downtime to a minimum.
Earlier, as a developer at Epic Ltd. / LEO Learning and the University of London Computer Centre, I was lead technical developer on Moodle systems for Aviva plc, the Nursing & Midwifery Council and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, and helped builed the Individual Learning Planner add-on for Moodle. I also built core backend features of Pi Datametrics and launched Squiddity, my own Flutter app for iOS and Android.
I'm Joe Cape. I started building Moodle systems in 2010, straight out of an M.Sc. in Information System Development, when a Stirling social enterprise needed an online course and I was contracting for a local web agency. I picked Moodle, built their platform, and they're still running it fifteen years later.
Most of my work since has been as a senior contractor: ten years with Aleido Learning in Sweden on Totara and Moodle products for regional government, an upgrade-and-migration cycle at Royal Holloway, and plugin and integration work for training providers and product teams. I've acted as sole end-to-end technical lead for organisations with no internal IT function, and as architectural reviewer and lead developer on larger teams.
Alba Education is the name I trade under. In practice you work directly with me — the person who writes the code also answers the email, which for most of my clients has been the point.
A plugin gap, an integration that half-works, a migration nobody wants to own, or overflow work you'd rather hand to someone reliable — all welcome. I work at a day rate, remote, across UK and Spanish time zones.