Independent IT Consultant.
Sofware engineer, system administrator, analyst with a strong background
in IT security.
20 years of IT experience in multiple fields.
Retro computing and gaming enthousiast.
Jump to: Experience | Skills | Education | Hobbies | Influences | Contact information
At Scanit I performed security audits, pentesting and reporting for major
telecom and banking companies in the Middle East region.
I was in charge of internal project such as the planning, implementation
and configuration of a secure, corporate VPN system and a Samba File
server integration.
Duties included system administration, infrastructure planning and IT
support for the company's employees and clients.
I built a custom content management system for the company from scratch.
First in PHP, then the web application was ported to Ruby on Rails.
Kosmo Systems developed a wifi content delivery system using a Tomcat,
Apache, Ruby on Rails, Chillispot stack. I was part of the team
developing, installing and configuring this system on the clients'
premises, several major shopping malls in Dubai.
Kosmo Systems ceased operations in the region in November 2006. The entire
team was forced to find work elsewhere.
At UnlimITed I performed periodic on site IT support visits for large clients mainly in the construction industry. My duties included composing periodic systems' status reports, on call and remote IT incident handling.
At Action Impact I handled the day to day management of IT operations such as incident handling, procurement of new hardware and software. I lead the expansion and move of the existing IT infrastructure from 20 users to 100+ users.
Spinbits was one of the first startup web development companies in the
region. I joined them as a Ruby on Rails developer with the experience I
gained working with the framework at Kosmo Systems.
We developed full stack web applications for medium to large size
companies in the region. I was able to refine and apply my system
administration experience as well as gain new skills such as cloud
computing configuration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). I taught myself to
work with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure as well as its S3
cloud storage solution.
When I moved to Indonesia I set myself up with a self-employed business
license registered in Jakarta. Under this license I performed IT
consultancy, hosting and software development services for major clients
in the area including The German Centre for Industry and Trade, Tebodin,
Coseinc (Singapore) and Vincent Sheppard.
For several of these projects I had to become proficient in the local
language, Bahasa Indonesia.
During my time as a self-employed IT consultant in Indonesia I took on a
part time job as an IT security engineer and sofware developer at Bellua
Asia Pacific, a respected IT security firm in the Asia Pacific region.
At Bellua I performed pentests, composed reports presented to clients and
developed in-house software using Python, Django and Google Web
Toolkit.
I attended and volunteered at several IT security conferences in the
region such as
HITB Malaysia.
In December 2011 I met James Richards in Jakarta. He hired me to build an
idea he was working on: a marketplace for lawyers. A few months later we
expanded on his initial idea and co-founded The Advisable Company, a New
York based startup. James took on the role of CEO and I became CTO. For
over a year I was the sole developer of the Ruby on Rails based web
application.
In february 2013 I moved to New York and a few weeks later we moved the
company to San Francisco.
After that we applied and got accepted to Y Combinator, a reputable
Silicon Valley based incubator.
We followed the program and pivoted our idea and company a few weeks
before our first investors pitch at Demo Day. We became Teleborder, Inc.
Teleborder, Inc. is a pivoted version of Advisable. Teleborder aims to
make hiring overseas talent for US based companies easy through an online
platform.
In July 2014 Teleborder announced a seed round of slightly under $1
million led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Indonesia’s East
Ventures.
At Teleborder I wrote the initial web application from scratch using the
Ruby on Rails framework and Heroku hosting. I then proceeded to build a
development team. I wrote documentation on best code writing practices and
correct use of collaboration tools and source code management software
such as git.
In December 2013 I moved back to Belgium and continued development of
Teleborder with a team based in Antwerp.
In August 2014 I resigned my position as CTO of Teleborder. I continue to
be acknowledged as a co-founder and major shareholder.
In April 2016 Teleborder was aquired by TriNet (NYSE: TNET), a leading
cloud-based provider of HR services.
As a self-employed IT consultant I have worked or I am working on the following projects:
Systems programming project in Python.
https://calculator.aeddisplay.com/
Dustproof was a project I started in early 2016 as a personal challenge to implement the data aggregation and analysis of homemade particulate matter sensors. I got interested in this particular IoT implementation after seeing the lutftdaten.info project take off.
The application is built on InfluxDB, WiFi, LoRaWAN technology and a custom built API.
VH Technics, a reputable heating and sanitation installation and
maintenance company needed a custom application for technicians to compose
on site maintenance reports.
I have built a Ruby on Rails based web application that allows a
technician to identify installations at the clients' premises and compose
maintenance reports using a tablet and QR codes.
These maintenance reports can subsequently be reviewed by a manager who
can approve them and send a status report to the client.
I continue to host and maintain this application.
Photocloud was a cloud service to safely share pictures with friends and family developed in Ruby on Rails.
For myself and several small to medium sized clients I host and maintain
an email hosting infrastructure built with open source software including
Postfix, Dovecot and Rspamd.
During installation and configuration, best security and anti-spam
practices such as SPF and DKIM were applied.
In addition I host and maintain several static and dynamic websites on
servers using LAMP stacks.
I have 20 years of programming experience. The first language I mastered
was BASIC. With the release of Windows 95 I quickly moved on to Visual
Basic. Later followed C and C++.
After a quick detour via AT&T Assembly, I learned several scripting
languages such as Python, Perl, PHP and later on Ruby.
I am skilled in HTML and JavaScript, but not good at CSS and web design in
general. Fortunately my knowledge of several web front-ends such as
Twitter Bootstrap, Skeleton and Wordpress make up for that.
I write unit and integration tests for my code and
I use git for version control .
I have 20 years of system administration experience. I started out with
MS-DOS, Windows and Windows NT. Then I learned about Linux, BSD and Mac OS
X.
My favorite server operating system is Debian, for desktops Mac OS X (for
now). More recently I have gained significant experience with cloud based
services such as Amazon Web Services, Heroku and DevOps frameworks such as
Puppet and Chef.
I maintain my own e-mail, web hosting and Ruby on Rails application server
infrastructure.
I was an average student. I gained very little IT related knowledge in
school, nearly all my skills come from self-education and experience.
When I was young and inexperienced I made several attempts at gaining a
higher degree, none of them successful.
This is a list of some people and projects that have and continue to influence my work and hobbies: