Short Bio
Steven Thys is a driven web developer with a practical sense of reality. He specializes in ASP.NET and user experience. He has managed and aided several community projects and helped build up solid tools and web presences for brands like Game Mania, Carrefour, Johnon & Johnson.
Steven helps people build established user satisfaction and is the person to call when honest long term value is more important than short term profit. In an environment where ideas and market requirements change rapidly he is able to quickly respond while keeping a global overview in mind. His wide knowledge makes him a great asset to translate business needs to IT and technical aspects to the business.
He has great interest in martial arts, design, audio production, internet marketing and psychology. Continuous improvement by learning, retrying and persevering is something he strives for.
Experience and achievements
Egitura - Development & Consultancy (Owner)
2016 - present
Egitura - Development and Consultancy (Owner)
Egitura delivers competitive and user friendly web experiences to fortify the online presence of micro to middle sized companies who want to grow by delivering true and lasting value to their customers.
We specialize in ASP.NET, user experience and DNN (DotNetNuke) development. We offer services around information and design, web development, analytics, data integration, responsive and mobile design, online business strategy & marketing as well as photography. For more info please check egitura.com.
See below for projects we provided value for on a freelance basis.
Relevant Skills and technologies: UX (User Experience) ASP.NET C# VB.NET WCF Project Management Analysis Database Design SQL Entity Framework Project Management Mercurial HTML CSS JavaScript SPA Frameworks Design Patterns .NET Security Agile development SCRUM
Freelance Designer, Front-end Developer and Digital Marketing Consultant @ Ecerium
Januari 2017 - Juli 2017
Freelance assignment for Postbird, an inhouse Ecerium project
For Postbird, a new project by Ecerium to easily convert digital documents to physical documents and have them automatically sent physically via BPost, we were responsible for delivering a fresh and engaging design, and implementation into the front-end. We also worked together with Marketing to fortify the online presence of Postbird. (more info at https://www.postbird.be)
Relevant Skills and technologies: HTML 5 CSS3 JavaScript AngularJS 2 Cross browser Digital Marketing Google Adwords
Freelance assignment for Carrefour commissioned by Ecerium
Design and frontend development on the CZAM mastercard project for Carrefour. We were assigned to this project shortly before it went live to do complex cross browser bugfixes and ensure a timely delivery for go live. (more info at https://www.compteczam.fr)
Relevant Skills and technologies: HTML 5 CSS3 JavaScript AngularJS 1 Cross browser design and development Cross browser testing
Kinderopvang In de Wolken
March 2017
Webdesign and Branding Kinderopvang In de Wolken
For a new local day care center we created a joyful website that breathes the atmosphere and quality of care that this day care center delivers and provides parents with the needed information to get in touch and know their children are in a happy and safe environment. Apart from creating the website we took care of the logo design and a poster design.
Relevant Skills and technologies: Adobe Suite HTML 5 CSS3 JavaScript Wordpress Linux Hosting Branding SEO
Freelance .NET Developer @ Johnson & Johnson
November 2016 - Januari 2017
Freelance assignment for Johnson & Johnson (Janssen Pharmaceutica)
We worked on the conversion of a legacy VB application to an ASP.NET C# web application (which imports lab data, analyzes and processes it and creates specific excel reports) and integrated it in a new smart lab management system using modern code practices.
Relevant Skills and technologies: ASP.NET C# VB WEB API 2 Unity Dependency Injection Unit Testing MSTest Entity Framework EPPlus
Web Application Developer @ PB Projects, owners of the Game Mania concept
September 2007 - present
Employer: Peter Bergmans, Etienne Delrue
Steven was responsible for redesigning and building up a new .NET website for the Game Mania concept on top of DotNetNuke, an open source content management system. The assignments started out with creating a myriad of designs for competitions, promotional material and miscellaneous web content. During this time, he was responsible for initiating a planning and design phase for the new website as well as executing it. To show product data from SAP, Steven worked together with a SAP consultant who provided webservice access to the internal SAP system. Successful deployments within budget and time-frame would become a habit by being able to carefully plan and anticipate on development requirements and urgent requests and being able to divide these requirements in smaller chunks of performable actions giving the ability to quickly adopt to market and requirement changes and urgent requests.
From the first launch Steven took responsibility for creating the software, monitoring, logging and IIS management of the web server as well as planning and thinking about new business requirements along with the project manager and the marketing department. He expanded the site bit by bit into a very customized application with over 50 custom made modules for DotNetNuke (user controls following the DotNetNuke rules for user registration, password retrieval and resetting, profile management, store management, product extras, competitions, article linking, wish lists, collections, recently viewed, polls, filterable product lists, pre-orders, order management, bulk newsletters, Google analytics tracking, Google maps, store locator, advanced customized search engine, statistics, excel export, and much more). Analytics and logging were introduced from the beginning to get a good global and more in depth view of site usage and to anticipate the relevancy of business ideas and determine required resources for future updates. The new developments over time showed solid increases in unique visitors. Steven created a user experience that received good feedback from end users and kept users on the site for longer periods of time and decreased customer service requests. Steven also kept a very good and constant communication between him and other in house staff working with the administration functionality of the website making sure end user's demands were met and staff had no issues with using the software. 2nd and 3rd line support was also one of the tasks Steven took care of.
Steven researched and implemented several search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to highly increase the Game Mania websites search engine ranking results. The requirement for being shown in the top 3 Google results for several components was successfully met with a tight limitation of available content strategies.
After some years an analysis was made to perform a large 2 phase refactoring to improve the maintainability of the code base and implement a better separation of concerns as the difference between the current development practices and 'straight out of school' development practices were very clear. Self-study and the motivation to improve coding skills and the stability of the code base made this possible in an environment where no senior developer was available to learn from.
A security analysis primarily based on the OWASP .NET Project was created, several stress and penetration tests were executed and many .NET security improvements were implemented. One of these improvements was to improve the encryption and hashing security and separate the user data out of the web database into an internal database only available through a separate WCF service layer within the company network. This service layer uses Entity Framework 4 for interacting with the MS SQL 2005 database.
Another important achievement Steven played a key part in when it mattered the most was the migration of several in house servers to an external data center. The migration of the web and SQL server were handled smoothly and a host of last minute issues were fixed within the migration weekend. When the external hosting company was having severe unforeseen issues with their hardware Steven was able to successfully monitor the issues and reverse the entire migration without the loss of any data. He worked closely together with the in house team and the external engineers.
Further down the road Steven worked together with the cash register software team to create WCF services for the POS and integrate POS WCF services in the web application for placing orders, linking customers, updating customer info, etc so the company could further strengthen its market position and handle certain bussiness processes more smoothly.
Apart from the main continuous project several side projects were completed like an analysis for an internal messaging system for company stores, another custom DotNetNuke based website for the D3mon in house accessory label, ASP.NET web services for providing game data to the in store narrow-casting system and more.
Relevant Skills and technologies: ASP.NET 4.0 ASP.NET 2.0 ASP.NET Webforms ASP.NET AJAX C# VB.NET DotNetNuke WCF Services ASP.NET Webservices MS SQL 2005 MS SQL 2008 Telerik ASP.NET controls HTML HTML5 CSS CSS3 JavaScript jQuery jQuery UI IIS 7.5 IIS 6 Windows Server 2008 R2 ITIL Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Support level 2 & 3 Relational Database Design Visual Studio 2010 Professional Visual Studio 2008 Professional Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Adobe Photoshop CS3 Adobe Fireworks CS3 Design aesthetics Atlassian Jira Atlassian Confluence Mercurial Source Control
Team: 2 project managers, 1 SAP consultant, 2 Cash Register Software developers, 1 web developer, 1 server and network admin, 2 designers
Personal / Volunteer Project
2012 to 2013
Personal / Volunteer Hobby Project
Creating a software as a service (SaaS) like, service oriented web application that communicates to backend WCF services. The application provides a front end, a product management area, a central server with a master application, client software instances and service layers to connect the different sections. The user area consists of configuration wizards for adding instances of the client software and a dashboard to manage the client software on a central server and view its results. The ASP.NET website connects to a MySQL database for both regular and authentication data and uses Entity Framework 4. In addition to the web development, was partly responsible for planning, research, marketing and decision taking. Other team members took care of writing the master application software and setting up the network infrastructure and deploying instances of client software on the central server that are being fed data, controlled by the master application. Continuous development and improvements are being achieved by good communication and agile and scrum approaches.
Relevant Skills and technologies: ASP.NET ASP.NET AJAX WCF C# Analysis Database Design MySQL MySQL .NET Connector Entity Framework 4 Database Migrations Automatic Builds Continuous Integration SVN HTML HTML5 CSS3 JavaScript jQuery Design Patterns .NET Security Agile development SCRUM Atlassian Jira Atlassian Confluence
Team: 1 network engineer, 3 developers, 2 designers
Delta-Visions (Owner)
September 2006 - May 2012
Personal Community Project
Created a concept for people to learn and share graphic design skills. Owned and managed a free online community forum aimed towards graphic designers. Took responsibility for all areas, from hosting and technical issues, to member interrelation issues, staff management, content management, and along the way delegated responsibilities to a continuously expanding team of volunteers. Organized weekly competitions and provided a broad range of tutorials mainly geared at small art. According to many member testimonials, we created one of the most relaxed, friendly and helpful online graphics communities.
Relevant skills and technologies: Project management Graphic Design HTML CSS Cinema 4D 3D Studio Max Apophysis Invision Power Board Content Management Staff management PLESK hosting panel MySQL PHP JavaScript Design aesthetics Wordpress
Team: 5-20 volunteers
Miscellaneous Personal, Volunteer and Freelance projects
September 2016
Cosmic Core Redesign
Redesigned the cosmic-core website to give it a modern look and feel and to make the website accessible on mobile devices. A couple of basic widget integrations were done for Mailchimp, Soundcloud, Google Analytics and PayPal. The project was done in function of a new album release for which a track was also contributed. Check it out ;)
Relevant skills and technologies: HTML5 CSS3 JavaScript AngularJs jQuery Foundation 6 Graphic Design Identity creation Photoshop Illustrator Design aesthetics Audio Production
Team: 1 Project leader, 1 developer and designer, 2 content managers, 2 Mastering technicians, 20+ contributors
April 2012
Cosmic Core
Created an identity (logo, artwork, web design) around a concept introduced by a fellow musician. Developed a website with basic information and audio players for a collective of both starting and established producers around the world creating electronic music with Ableton Live. Also created a techno track for the launch of this project.
Relevant skills and technologies: HTML CSS JavaScript jQuery Graphic Design Identity creation Photoshop Illustrator Design aesthetics Audio Production Mixing Ableton Live Sound design
Team: 1 Project leader, 1 developer, 2 content managers, 2 Mastering technicians, 20+ contributors
2011
Audiorealism ABL2 User Interface Design
Created a functional user interface for the Audiorealism ABL2 TB-303 emulator VST plugin
Relevant skills and technologies: User Interface Design Photoshop CS3 Design aesthetics
2011
Hypersynth SIDizer User Interface Design
Created the new official user interface for the Hypersynth SIDizer Commodore 64 emulator plugin
Relevant skills and technologies: User Interface Design Photoshop CS3 Design aesthetics Communication
2011
Lennar Digital Sylenth1 User Interface Design
Created a user interface for Lennard Addink's Lennar Digital Sylenth1 VST plugin
Relevant skills and technologies: User Interface Design Photoshop CS3 Design aesthetics
2005
Casino on location
Created a basic ASP website with a back end administration panel to edit pages and content for a company that delivers casino services on location.
Relevant skills and technologies: ASP HTML CSS Photoshop
1999 - 2003
Hardsignal
Was part of group of 4 people creating and performing live techno music with both audio production hardware and software.
Relevant skills and technologies: Audio production Sound design
1999 - 2003
Killer Instinct
Started and managed (and competed in) a Counter-strike: Source e-sports team. We managed to place ourselves in the top 3 of the Benelux Clanbase league.
Relevant skills and technologies: Team management
Team: 5 - 10 members
Web designer internship @ A Class Business
February 2007 - June 2007
Employer: Zargham Ghorayshian
- Created several graphic user interfaces and converted these to functional websites for several small businesses.
- Created and animated a corporate 3D logo for a gaming accessory retail company.
- Developed a basic ASP.NET content management system for small sized company websites.
Relevant skills and technologies: ASP.NET 2.0 VB.NET HTML CSS JavaScript PHP Visual Studio 2005 MS SQL 2005 Express Adobe Photoshop CS Visual Studio 2005 Express Cinema 4D
Team:1 Business + Project leader, 1 Developer
Education
Sitecore XP 8.0 Certified Professional Developer
2015
Sitecore XP 8.0 Certified Professional Developer
Sitecore Belux INT Belgium Trainer Candidate
A1 - Graduate Applied Information Technology
2003 - 2007
Main subject: Systems and network management
Katholic Highschool Kempen - Campus HIKempen Geel
Department Commercial Sciences and Business Administration
Commercial Web Technologies
2002 - 2003
Specialisation in web technologies
Sint-Jozefscollege Herentals
Accountancy / Information Technology (TSO) and Modern Languages / Maths (ASO)
1997 - 2001
Secondary education
Trade school (Handelsschool) Turnhout
Modern Languages / Maths (ASO)
1994 - 1997
Secondary education
Sint-Jozefscollege Turnhout
Key Skills
Development
Medior
Junior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Medior
Junior
Junior
Junior
Junior
Junior
Medior
Junior
Medior
Medior
Languages
Good, mother tongue
Good
Basic understanding, minimal spoken and written
Minimal
General Computer Knowledge
Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 7 Microsoft Office 2003 Office 2007 Office 2010 Word Excel Powerpoint Access OutlookMiscellaneous
- Provide value through entire project lifecycle
- Achieve independently without the need of close supervision and get things done
- Communicate clearly with team members and other business departments
- Keep global view, take care in making decisions and spot potential pitfalls early on
- Take a direction, follow through, and make the corrections necessary to stay on track
- Desire to learn and go through the process of learning and continuously improve