My role at BR was to solve scaling issues and create an external community review platform that could be bolted onto their existing website but essentially, would become its own entity later.

The scaling issues BR were facing were due to a mix of code and infrastructure architecture. Code wise, their website is a WP site with (many) plugins. These additional plugins and theme being used meant that a single post page would run as many as 150 queries to load. At peak time this would often cause issues with their MySQL DB. The solution here was to implement an effective caching strategy. We moved from DO to AWS and began using CloudFront, RDS, EC2 and ELB. The biggest impact was using CloudFront and the implementation of a good cache invalidation strategy that would only invalidate the affected pages of an admin update.

The review platform was built with serverless architecture. The backend used EC2, Lambda, Cognito, SQS, SNS, DDB, CW, AppSync and API Gateway. I chose these technologies for speed of development and lack of needing a devops team to help maintain the system. The frontend was integrated into the website using an IFrame and was hosted using S3 and CF.

DatHuis is an automation tool for real estate brokers focusing on the Dutch real estate market.

At DatHuis I helped sign a no code filter language that would allow brokers to create filters with boolean logic. This was achieved with using ElasticSearch and GraphQL.

I created a transformation layer between our database (DDB) and ElasticSearch that kept our ES models in sync with our DB models that also allowed for custom mappings on DB models on a DB model type basis. The outcome was that we had full typescript support for ES and DDB models, our ES models were prepared for mapping updates if and when we wanted to include them. We could update a mapping automatically using ES reindexing and multiple indexes.

When I joined Saavu in November 2018, Saavu was working on an events management solution focusing at the time on corporate events. However, we shortly pivoted from events manage into micro payments. The idea was really good. I watch YouTube, I want to support the creators I watch but I do not want to give them all 1$ per month, maybe I want to share 10$ over 100 creators. To do this, Saavu would allow me to donate 10$ per month, and have this amount equally divided over my selected creators.

Saavu was a small team and I had a lot of freedom to choose technologies and learn new skills. I got my first real professional experience setting up CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, learning from some amazingly talented Frontend developers. On a day to day basis, the core tech stack was NodeJS (Express) in a microservices architecture, PG, Zeit, Docker and NuxtJS.

My role at SailChecker was to build an integration to combine third party APIs to find yachts for rent. The core tech stack at SailChecker when I joined was PHP (drupal), MySQL and bare metal servers. As a team we created a platform where customers could search the entire market to find the best deals on yachts.

We built the third party API integration with Node, MySQL and Vue for the frontend.

I joined Dental Departures in March 2016. My role was primarily as a backend web developer however I found myself working on the frontend at times as well. I worked on 3 large features during my time with Dental Departures. I improved their existing search functionality by reducing load times, and second to that, at the time you could only search by clinic. I added the ability to search for doctors and the clinics they worked in. This involved some changes to their in house CRM as we did not want to include all doctors by default, only selected doctors.

Next I helped work on SEO functionality, this was guided by our in house SEO guru, I followed his lead and implemented his plans for content.

I also worked on an in-house analytics program to workout the cost of a lead. We had very long lead times ~6 months and wanted to make sure we could attribute a lead back to the correct source.

The core tech stack at DD were PHP (symfony), MySQL and Ember.js

E-Commerce Workroom was a web development agency, although they took on other projects from time to time as well. My role at E-Commerce Workroom ended up being very varied. I ended up working on mobile projects involving Ionic (Cordova at the time), web projects and even some embedded engineering projects involving Arduinos.

I continued to collaborate with E-Commerce Workroom for many years, I'd usually be getting paid to learn new skills which was always an amazing opportunity :)

ITMarine Ltd is a communication service for ship brokerage companies. I joined ITM Ltd with a short term contract to build a REST API in PHP. The goal of this API was to intake market data from various sources and provide close to real time aggregation of the different sources. The API had to be designed in such a way that it could be consumed by many frontend clients including Java, web and mobile.