Independent IT Consultant.
Programmer, 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:
Dustproof is 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 [InfluDB](https://www.influxdata.com/), WiFi, LoRaWAN technology and a custom built API. A demo of a live sensor which has been running continuously for over two years can be found here: https://app.dustproof.be/public/devices/3dfbc3f4-573e-4bab-b257-3fb0bd01dba2/daily
https://calculator.aeddisplay.com/
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 is a cloud service to safely share pictures with friends and family. I have developed this service in Ruby on Rails and continue to host, maintain and improve it. More information can be found at https://photocloud.be.
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 Spamassassin.
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
.
More recently I have been brushing up my skills in low level programming following the
rising popularity of the
Rust programming language.
A side project I am currently working on with a friend is an
NES emulator
written in Rust.
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: