Joyous Coding

What I do

I've been building software and helping people build software for the last twenty years. I'm now working as a freelance. My full profile is available on LinkedIn but here are some relevant experiences:

  • I've spent 8 years early in my career at M-Team - a branch of Belgium's very complex and complete social security system. I learned a lot about complex, changing, law-based specifications, "legacy" systems and how to work together on a massive old codebase.
  • I cofounded PullReview - a now-defunct startup active in the automated code review area. While this ended up in failure, I learned a lot by having to do "a bit of everything" - from sales (I now know I'm quite bad at it) to marketing to HR to legal. As a CFO once told me "It's weird. You seems to understand what I do and why it matters".
  • I worked several years as a freelance for Swift, helping to move a team from an operational model to a product-based one, coaching them into good software development practice. While I'm often critical of how big companies (and Swift) work, I learned how to succeed and deliver value in such environments
  • I was Bluesquare CTO for 5 years, a scale up active un public health. I lead the company development team in high-growth situations. This included developing and managing a product line, hiring and shaping a fully remote team and being part of the C-level management.
  • I worked at Shayp on a major migration from Pyramid/Mongo to Django/Postgresql
  • I always kept a coaching/teaching activity through various channels - I cofounded LeWagon Brussels chapter and coached several batches of students there. I also created a custom bootcamp for a major Belgian Bank, giving new front-end skills to a team of developers there. More recently, I coached at Osoc and taught some React Native to a group of blind students via Eqla.
  • I was director of software at Skills Union where I managed the Software Engineering curriculum.
  • I've been a senior developer at IOS Press, an editor of scientific papers. I managed a pipeline extracting metadata to create a graph database out of them, with the associated front ends to query it.
  • I did a 3 months mission as a technical advisor at WHO for Bluesquare to help create a platform to manage covid data - from collection to dashboards
  • I've joined Beeodiversity a company that uses... bees and the pollen they collect to do pollution evaluation. In just two years, I created the MVP of our platform and scaled a team from one (me) to 6 developers in the before happily going back to software development.
  • I've worked wor Travelsify to help generate nice looking PowerPoint's from the advanced metrics their system produce.
  • Finally I'm coaching/advising some early(sh) stage startups on technical matters - generally acting as a sounding board for the CTO/lead dev and using my "I've been there before" power.

I'm currently working mainly at two companies:

  • I'm a self-proclaimed "Geek des champs" at Farm For Good - a cooperative of farmers working on agroecological practices. I'm building a platform to help them manage their data to take more informed decisions.
  • I'm working as a mix of Lead Developer and Project manager for Bluesquare, a company I know really well for being a CTO there for five years previously. I'm now in charge of a collaborative project between WHO and UNICEF.

Technology-wise, I generally use what is there/what the team knows, with emphasis in going with well-established technologies as much as possible - popular stacks have a lot of examples and documentation available, large ecosystems and a good pool of developers to hire from - perks that are generally more important than the specific technical aspects.

I've worked (in a production setting) with Java, Ruby, JavaScript (and TypeScript), PHP and Python - I'll probably learn others as needed. I mostly work with web technologies even if I did some mobile dev too. Due to my Economics degree, I tend to have a good grasp of statistics, so Data Science is generally accessible to me.

Thanks to Marleen, Christophe, Nicolas, Zineddine, Stefan, Anne, Sébastien, Ben, Stéphanie, Kim, Michael, Alexandra, Clotilde, Harold and all the others for your trust.

Interested to contract me? Send me an email at martin@joyouscoding.com