About
Adam Ashmore
Co-founder of Ebuyer.com, lifelong coder, and the person behind SupplyMars.
SupplyMars is a working demonstration of how I think, how I build and how I approach complex problems. It models real back-office e-commerce operations: multi-supplier sourcing, dynamic pricing, order fulfilment and reporting, with live data flowing through it every day.
I chose e-commerce because I spent fifteen years building one of the UK's largest online retailers, and wanted to revisit familiar problems with hindsight and a clean sheet.
I am now looking for interesting work, bringing hands-on engineering, commercial understanding and experience of building systems that businesses depend on.
About Me
25+ Years Building Software
Most of my career has been spent building things end to end: working directly with the people who needed the software, understanding their problems, and turning those into working systems.
That has involved writing code, shaping products, building teams and helping developers grow. I enjoy the detail of implementation as much as the wider challenge of deciding what to build and how to make it useful.
Some of the work I am proudest of has come from close collaboration. SupplyMars is a solo project by choice: modern tooling made it possible, and it felt too exciting not to try.
Background
I wrote my first program at age 9 on a ZX81, and have never really stopped. With a degree in Electronic Engineering, I spent several years working in electronics, designing high-performance components for military, aerospace and industrial applications. In 1998, I moved fully into software, building web tools at a UK internet service provider.
1999–2014
Ebuyer.com
In late 1999, I co-founded Ebuyer.com, an online retailer of computer and electrical goods. In the early years, I was the sole developer, building both the customer-facing website and the full suite of tools covering procurement, product management, customer service, logistics, fulfilment, returns, accounting, marketing and analytics, all on a LAMP stack. This was 2000, long before frameworks, cloud services or payment platforms made any of it easy.
MySQL was at the heart of everything. I designed the database from the schema up, wrote the reporting queries and summary tables the business ran on, and became deeply proficient in performance tuning as data and traffic grew.
£300m+
Annual Turnover
200+
Staff
1m+
Customers
I saw that growth at every stage. In the early days, that meant building something from scratch, the excitement of watching the first orders come in, celebrating when we reached 100 orders in a single day, and still helping pick, pack and answer customer calls. Later it meant the scale and automation of shipping 10,000 boxes per day across multiple warehouses and couriers, and watching the last trucks leave each evening.
Ebuyer was acquired in 2004. I chose to stay for another decade.
As the company grew from five people to one of the UK's largest online retailers, I built the team around the platform: developers, designers, sysadmins, DBAs and technical support. As IT Director I led and mentored them, oversaw most of our projects and features, and stayed hands-on in the code. We worked in fast, iterative cycles, shipping early, gathering feedback and improving continuously. Code reviews, shared ownership and close collaboration with non-technical teams were how we operated.
Throughout all of that, what I valued most was the direct relationship with the people using the software: sitting with each department to understand how they worked, then building the tools that made them faster. That pattern shaped how I think about software to this day.
2009
Wren Kitchens
In 2009, we adapted the Ebuyer codebase to launch Wren Kitchens, taking a platform built for online retail and reshaping it for a completely different business model. The platform played its part in what Wren became.
100+
Showrooms
6,000+
Employees
£1.25bn+
Annual Turnover
As of 2022
Since 2014
Still Building
The sale of Ebuyer gave me the freedom to step back and raise a young family. But I never stopped building. I kept coding, kept learning, and continued developing with modern frameworks, cleaner architecture, automated testing, containerised workflows and CI/CD.
Some things I used years ago have been replaced by better alternatives; others remain exactly the right tools. What matters is knowing what fits, and why.
Now that my children are older, I am ready to return to a team and take responsibility for meaningful work again. I want to stay hands-on, work with good people and make full use of my experience.
What I Bring
A Broad Range of Skills
Much of my career has involved work that many organisations would spread across several roles. The specific tools in this project are only part of the picture.
Product Thinking
Understanding what matters, what does not, and what the software is actually there to do.
Technical Architecture
Designing systems that are clear, maintainable, and suited to the real problem.
Software Engineering
Currently PHP and Symfony, but the discipline (domain modelling, APIs, async workflows, testing) transfers across stacks.
Database Design
Deep experience with MySQL, from schema design and SQL to reporting and performance.
UI/UX
Interfaces that are clear, task-focused, and built for people who need to get things done.
Front-end Development
Currently Tailwind and Hotwire, but the underlying concern is speed, clarity and usability.
QA & Testing
Quality built in through automated tests, static analysis, code review and sensible discipline.
DevOps & Infrastructure
Docker, CI/CD, AWS, queues and caching, plus years of managing bare-metal LAMP stacks.
Data & Reporting
Reporting, dashboards, summary models, segmentation, and a strong instinct for what operational data is actually useful.
Communication
Explaining trade-offs clearly and translating between technical and non-technical concerns.
Operations & Process
Systems shaped around real workflows, not abstract diagrams.
Leadership & Mentoring
Building teams, mentoring developers, and helping people improve along with the software.
Sometimes that means being hands-on across a broad range; sometimes it means working with specialists and seeing the bigger picture. I am comfortable taking a project from an initial conversation through to a running system, or stepping into an existing team where broad experience and judgement are useful.
How software is delivered matters as much as how it is written. Fast iteration, refactoring, automated testing, clean version control and sensible tooling are part of doing the work properly.
You can explore the engineering behind SupplyMars on GitHub, including the architecture decisions, test suite and infrastructure.
Why Now
Software Is Changing Again
AI tooling shortens the distance between an idea and a working system, but it does not remove the need for experience. If anything, it makes judgement more important: understanding the problem properly, choosing what matters, keeping the design clear, and knowing when something is good enough.
I wrote most of SupplyMars by hand, with AI as an assistant. My workflow has since evolved, and AI now generates much of the code I write. I remain responsible for the architecture, the decisions and the result: understanding the implementation, reviewing changes, testing behaviour and making sure the system remains maintainable.
That combination of experience and new tools makes this a particularly exciting time to be building software. SupplyMars is one example of how I put it into practice.
Get in Touch
Let's Talk
Adam Ashmore
I am looking for interesting, ambitious work with people who care about what they build – as a senior or lead engineer, founding engineer or hands-on CTO, building something new or modernising an established business.
I am open to permanent roles, contracts or consultancy, remote or on-site. If that sounds like a fit, I would love to hear from you.