Sketched drawing of white non-binary person with glasses and long hair.

About Artful Robot

Hi, my name's Rich Lott and I've been running Artful Robot since it started in 2012. I bring 20+ years' experience creating, developing and managing websites and databases in the charity, not for profit and social business sector.

  • I have "full stack" technical expertise, meaning I'm experienced in everything from the day to day care and maintenance of servers and software, through to developing accessible user interfaces that work across browsers and devices.

  • I have an eye for good design and good user experiences (UX), I like to provide tools that enable people to do their thing with confidence.

  • I'm friendly, helpful and reliable with people, too. I'm good at listening, understanding how organisations work and explaining how I can help. I enjoy doing training and providing support.

  • I specialise in work for charities, campaigns and not-for-profits; I believe I can help you make a difference.

Please get in touch using the contact button in the header. You can find me on Mastodon @artfulrobot@fosstodon.org

I'm available for work.

As well as offering fully managed services like websites and CiviCRM databases, I'm also here for one off projects and open to working in your existing tech teams to boost capacity for a particular project or sprint, or to top up your team's expertise. Projects range from specific extensions/plugins/modules through to consultation and advice, data visualisations, API-based integrations, troubleshooting etc.

  • PHP engineer with extensive experience. I write code as I'd like to read it myself, because working with others is how we learn. And because I've learnt the hard way about the importance of writing maintainable code!
  • Front end developer : HTML5, CSS, SVG, Javascript developer for everything from progressive enhancement frolicks to big single page apps. I maintain several medium sized VueJS/Svelte projects, but wherever possible I prefer tiny, no-build-step libraries like AlpineJS; HTMX, or simply vanilla JS and web components.
  • CMS developer/admin: My first choice open source CMS these days is ProcessWire as it offers incredible flexibility and provides the ability to move fast. I also use Backdrop, Drupal and I'm familiar with WordPress.
  • Sysadmin for dozens of Debian/Linux machines. Most at home on the command line. Let me tell you about my NeoVim config..!

Open source

I specialise in open source technology and typically licence code under the AGPL. This means you get to keep any code I write for you and are free to update it in the future as you need, even if we're no longer working together. It also means other organisations can benefit from code you needed, which is great because not only have you helped another organisation out, but you can also benefit from improvements that others make and share back.

If you're a CiviCRM user, you're probably already using some of my code.

You can find my code in the CiviCRM extensions directory (and their gitlab), Codeberg and I'm still on GitHub because of the monopoly it holds, (I've moved what I can to Codeberg for ethical reasons).

Ethics

I do what I do because I want humanity to be better. I don't work for organisations if their output doesn't align with this.

Many of my clients call me a magician because I'm able to use technology to help them succeed. But I don't believe in technology as a fairy godmother; I don't even believe technology is ‘neutral’. All technology is owned and controlled by someone, and the will of that someone matters. So I love tech that's decentrailsed, democratic, sustainable, standards-based and open source; I dislike anything centralised or proprietary because even if they appear benevolent, dictators are dictators.

I love tech communities that are friendly, welcoming, inclusive. Communities that recognise the need to actively work to counter bias and exclusion on gender, race, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence etc.

Despite having Robot in my business name, Artful Robot has nothing to do with the latest tech-bro neoliberal hype product bubble they call "AI". I am opposed to LLM and generative AI because it cannot be reconciled to the above ethics in any way. I highly recommend reading The AI Con by Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna.