Professional Experience
An overview of my previous and current projects
Freelance IT Specialist
August 2010 - Present
After working for 5 years at major Dutch internet agencies, I decided to take control and start my own business. Now I am at projects I can be passionate about, motivating me to be even more effective and efficient.
Spil Games (Performance Engineer)
The work involved front-end architecture and consultancy, performance monitoring and analysis, writing and automating test scripts, and best practices advocacy. Ultimately to shave off all bytes and milliseconds to maximize perceived performance, improving the user experience.
Spil Games is based in Hilversum. Their mission is to unite the world in play through a localized global network of online social-gaming platforms.
Project duration: 3 months
Spil Games (Senior Front-end Engineer)
Providing a broad range of skills in our scrum team to improve the games portal/applications on Hyves and Facebook: software design, code refactorings, performance tuning, and of course building new features.
Project duration: 6 months
Stichting Bibliotheek.nl
Providing consultancy to the front-end team in the fields of QA, performance and architecture.
Bibliotheek.nl, based in The Hague, will be releasing a common whitelabel portal to be used by any library in the Netherlands.
Project duration: 5 months
Adternity
Amplifying the two-man team with front and backend skills. Injecting (and implementing) knowledge regarding performance and release management. Development of new features based on customer input in a bi-weekly release schedule.
The specific application is a backend based on the Symfony framework (PHP) with Propel (ORM) to manage advertisements, advertisers, publishers, conversions, etcetera in a rich Ajax application (grids, modals, etc.).
Adternity GmbH is an Online Marketing Solutions company based in Duisburg, Germany.
Project duration: 3 months
Senior Technical Consultant
May 2007 - July 2010
For just over three years, I was working for Backbase. It has a very innovative and dynamic environment and is one of the key players in Rich Internet Applications. It evolved from a client-side framework to complete solutions for maximizing online customer experience. Lots of nationalities, lots of talents packed in one Amsterdam office. Within Backbase I could further improve my web development skills, while especially in the areas of communication and (technical) leadership I noticed I am able to deliver more than the average developer (e.g. coaching, training, pre-sales, proof-of-concepts, team lead).
Besides more abstract skills just outlined, I focused mostly on all aspects of RIA, UX, integration and performance tweaking using Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, and XSL. Usually based on progressive enhancement and supported by the Backbase Client Framework and the Rich Portal.
Absa Internet Banking
Large Rich Portal project for a South-African Bank. In this project I was working on-site as a team and technical lead for 10 front-end developers. It was a challenge advocating best practices and reusable components to developers relatively new to AJAX and relevant languages like Javascript and XSL. Expected go-live in 2011.
Ziggo
Another large Rich Portal project for a large telecom company in the Netherlands. In about a year, I had various roles ranging from team lead and "planning desk" to front-end development and technical lead. After go-live I initiated and led the subproject to further analyze and improve the performance on primarily the front page.
KPN vandaag
Portal project for the other large telecom provider in the Netherlands. This was one truly innovative project with perhaps the first true UX-based portal open to a large audience back in 2008. In this project I was technical lead.
On-site consulting & training
At various locations I gave full classroom AJAX trainings and short on-site consulting jobs (both usually took one week). Customers include Wood Mackenzie (Chester, UK), Bank of America (Edinborough, Scotland), Digiplug/Accenture (Paris, France), KPN, Philips, and last but not least, new Backbase hires. I truly enjoyed the flexible and spontaneous nature of these usually sudden needs, especially abroad.
Front-end & back-end developer
August 2005 - May 2007
For almost two years, eFocus was a great company for me to start developing my skills in a more professional environment. I quickly moved to larger projects and bigger teams, while finding my way between perfectionalism and pragmatism.
- Erasmus University Rotterdam. Role: front-end development.
- Wegener DM. Role: front-end development.
- Bloomberry. Role: front-end development.
- An Inquiry Management System for various customers (e.g. Eén Vandaag). Role: back-end and front-end technical lead.
- A Newsletter Management System for Ernst & Young, including HTML mailings. Role: back-end and front-end development.
For eFocus I concentrated mainly on web development using PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.