Sketch of Rich

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 sector.

  • Strong technical expertise from the ground up. I understand all the behind-the-scenes stuff (data security, server maintenance, Linux sysadmin, various programming languages, databases...) as well as the importance of clear, user-friendly systems that enable people to do their jobs more effectively.

  • Eye for good design and good user experiences (UX).

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

Hire Me

As well as offering fully managed services like websites and CRM databases, I'm also 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.

  • PHP coder with extensive experience in Drupal 7, CiviCRM and have also worked with Drupal 8, Laravel, Slim, WordPress. Up-to-date with PSR standards and newer code tools like composer.
  • Front end developer: HTML5, CSS (SASS), SVG, Javascript developer for frolicks and big single page apps.
  • Sysadmin for dozens of Debian/Ubuntu Linux machines, LAMP stack. Also regularly use Python, Perl, shell scripts etc. Big Git fan.

Open source

We specialise in open source technology and typically licence code under the GPL. This means you get to keep any code we 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.

We recently received an "empowering contributor" badge of honour for our open source work on CiviCRM.

Fork my code on GitHub. Or, better yet, on Codeberg (moved for ethical reasons). You can find me on Mastodon @artfulrobot@fosstodon.org