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About me

Steven Rombauts

I am a Belgian web developer and DevOps practitioner currently living in Cambridge, UK.

I help companies and people to plan, build and execute their web application projects.

My principal focus is building robust applications that run on top of a programmable infrastructure to optimize cooperation between all parties involved: from developers and sysadmins to the business experts.

I currently work as a freelance consultant.

Motto

You build it, you run it.

In a nutshell

I specialise in these types of applications and solutions:

  • Digital workflow and process management tools
  • Company portals and customer dashboards
  • Infrastructure management and automation
  • Application monitoring and improving performance

Skills

(in order of skill level)
This list is not exhaustive. Any project starts by looking for the right tool for the job.

Web Development

  • PHP
  • MySQL/SQL
  • Javascript
  • HTML & CSS
  • Java
  • Visual Basic
  • Go

Systems Administration

  • Puppet
  • Ansible
  • Bash
  • MySQL
  • Docker
  • Vagrant
  • ServerSpec
  • OpenVPN

Web Servers

  • Nginx
  • PHP-FPM
  • Apache
  • Varnish

Continuous Integration

  • TravisCI
  • Codeception
  • Packer
  • PHPunit
  • Capistrano
  • PHPMig / Phinx

Services & tools

  • Rackspace Cloud (Cloud Servers, Cloud Databases, Cloud Backups, ..)
  • New Relic
  • LogDNA
  • Cloudflare
  • StackPath
  • AWS (API Gateway, Lambda, EC2, CloudWatch, Route53, SNS, SQS, ..)

Content Management

  • Joomla
  • Wordpress
  • Jekyll
  • Drupal

Education

A2 Math Sciences

Sint Romboutscollege, Mechelen

1998 - 2003

Languages

Dutch

Native proficiency

English

Full professional proficiency

French

Limited working proficiency

Experience

DevOps Consultant

Cavere

November 2015 - present

Company profile

Cavere is an IT service provider in Belgium.

Responsibilities

  • Maintaining and securing their Linux infrastructure.

Lead DevOps Engineer

Timble

April 2012 - present

Company profile

Timble provides enterprise level development services centred around web applications and specialises in technology consultancy, advising startups and large cooperations.

Responsibilities

  • Lead DevOps engineer in charge of infrastructure management and systems monitoring.
  • Planning and execution of consultancy projects.
  • Providing training and technical support on Timble client projects.

Software developer

Joomlatools

April 2012 - present

Company profile


Joomlatools is a leading Joomla brand, providing world-class Joomla extensions and support.

Responsibilities

  • Lead Developer on the customer support portal.
  • Planning, building and maintaining Continuous Integration pipelines.
  • Lead Developer on a powerful suite of open source development tools for Joomla developers.
  • Code reviews and project management.
  • Writing blog posts to communicate our work and its significance to (potential) customers.

Lead Developer

PINCoding

September 2009 - April 2012

Company profile

An web development company providing online services and applications for small businesses.

Responsibilities

  • Lead Developer and project manager for a multitude of customer projects.

Highlights

Here are some of the things I've been up to in these past years:

Platform API

Implemented an API layer on top of the Linked-Law platform for content publishers.

June 2018

Updating servers w/ Ansible

Created Ansible scripts to automatically update all installed packages on existing Cloud infrastructure at Timble.

Time to apply security updates now takes 35 minutes, instead of an entire day.

November 2017

Marsvaardig

Built a programmable hosting infrastructure and deployment pipeline for Marsvaardig, a startup bringing a new perspective to building and maintaining websites.

October 2017

R code to API

Worked alongside a team of researchers to create a web API from their existing R code, using AWS API Gateway and OpenCPU.

August 2017

Launched Linked-Law

Built and helped to launch Linked-Law, a knowledge-sharing network for lawyers and jurists.

June 2017

Puppetize infrastructure

Design and replace all running cloud servers at Timble using Puppet configuration management, upgrading core technologies to latest versions in the process.

August 2016

Joomlatools Vagrant

Released and actively maintain this preconfigured Vagrant box for Joomla developers.

Over 20k downloads in its first two years!

July 2014

Joomla Composer plugin

Created and actively maintain the Joomlatools Composer plugin to install Joomla extensions automatically.

November 2013

Improve deployments

Replaced manual deployment processes with Capistrano-powered deployments for all Joomlatools applications. Reduced time for deployment from 1 hour to 2 minutes and eliminated all manual work.

September 2013

Belgian Police platform

Worked on the Belgian Police platform project, helping to build a high performance multi-site and multi-lingual platform for all Belgian police zones.

Responsible for coding new features and hosting of the platform.

October 2012

Mari-Team refactoring

Mari-Team is an application that monitors and analyses oil samples from ship engines.

Spearheaded the refactoring of the legacy codebase and implementation of new features.

December 2010

Vision

I am passionate about open source, sharing and collaboration. I strongly believe that open technologies and increased transparency can make for a better world.

How can I help?

Need help with your current or future web application projects? I'd love to help out!

Get in touch via hello@stevenrombauts.be.