I'm a belgian software developer and I'm passionate about my job.
I've worked in software for about 10 years, in a variety of environments, and in a variety of languages. I've worked with Ruby on Rails full-time for the last 4 years, and made minor contributions to both Ruby and Rails. I've recently developed a keen interest for several functional, concurrency-oriented languages like Erlang, Scala and Clojure.
I'm a decent writer and public speaker - I've spoken at Rubyconf, Railsconf, and quite a few nice regional conferences in Europe.
I take pride in progress of the team, and I always try to make constructive suggestions. I'm autonomous and can take initiative when needed, while always keeping others up to date.
I have some experience at leading small teams, in a collaborative mode, no nonsense or rockstar attitude. I have been using agile methodologies (XP, Scrum), without being dogmatic about them.
I'm part of the core team of FOSDEM, a large scale free open source conference taking place every year in Brussels. My hobbies are photography, improvisation (theatre), reading, cooking.
languages: Ruby, C, javascript, some Erlang, Clojure, Scala, (HTML, CSS), fond memories of Java
frameworks: Rails, Sinatra, experimenting with mochiweb and Lift
dbs: Postgres, Mongo, Redis, mysql, Oracle
tools: git, svn
operating systems: Unix, Linux, some BSD (and Mac)
architectures: from simple client-server, to service oriented, with messaging buses, queues, proxies, caching. Advocate of The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
human languages: english, french, dutch, some german and spanish
I started off with a degree in a different background and learned on the job for 6 years for a small banking consultancy company. I was sent to the UK to work on a project for a bank, developing and customizing the product, and adding interfaces to various other systems (mostly C).
After getting back to Brussels I worked for 2 years for Computer Science Corporation: Java application using Spring and Hibernate. Interesting and award-winning project to allow people to create and register companies online, this involved helping relevant government instances to develop the appropriate web services.
After I left Computer Science Corporation, I started working full-time as a Ruby on Rails freelancer. I worked 6 months for VRT Medialabs, a spin-off from the belgian public broadcasting service, to create a social networking site around videos.
Then I worked on a startup project for three months with an associate. We worked on a platform to give small associations a site to manage members, fees, resources and some basic accounting. This didn't quite pan out, but was an interesting experience.
I found a job with IBBT, to prototype some exciting applications, one about microblogging, the other with RFID tags.
Then I worked for a year for Vasco, a security company, building a platform for business to do authentication as a service. Interesting work involving hacking on ruby-openssl bindings, complex architectures with internal APIs.
I'm currently working on a project for VRT Medialabs again. The project's aim is to make watching TV a more interactive experience.
1993-1998 Masters degree in Material Science Engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
2005-2006 Masters degree in Artificial Intelligenceat the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Thesis about routing algorithms in mobile ad hoc networks.
Available from May, for full-time or freelance.
Based in Brussels for now but moving to London soon, and looking for jobs there.