CV - Steven Thys

Februari 2018 - August 2018

Freelance assignment for PATRONUS commisioned by Vanroey.be

For Patronus, a project to develop tools that provide personalized, blended, emotion-aware support to therapists and patients throughout the anxiety treatment process, Steven was part of the team responsible for setting up the Azure Cloud Architecture to support all involved parties as well as develop a dashboard web application for the therapists to manage and conduct therapy sessions both in vivo as in VR.

For this greenfield project Steven setup and created a Vuejs front-end webapplication for the first proof of concept as well as the backend asp.net core 2 web api to support it and communicate with several Azure services like Azure SQL, Azure Storage, App Insights, etc.

Relevant Skills and technologies: C# ASP.NET Core Web Api Entity Framework Core .NET Core 2 .NET Standard 2.0 Design Patterns Azure Application Services Azure SQL Azure Table Storage Azure Queue Storage Azure Blob Storage Azure Application Insights Azure Functions VSTS CD/CI Git JavaScript Vuejs Webpack Bootstrap

Februari 2018 - May 2018

Freelance assignment for Presa an inhouse Vanroey.be project

For Presa, a health care company Steven was responsible for speed and GDPR improvements of a legacy webforms application along with its documentation and support.

Code, memory and SQL Performance were monitored to track down the sources of the speed problems and create a plan on how to tackle them. The largest performance issues were fixed so the application became workable again.

The authentication and storage of user accounts was upgraded to be GDPR compliant.

Relevant Skills and technologies: C# ASP.NET Webforms ASMX Web Services .NET .NET Profiling GDPR

November 2017 - February 2018

Freelance assignment for Sirvo commissioned by Vanroey.be

For Sirvo, a health care company focusing on enabling caretakers to spend more time with their clients and improve their digital administration Steven was responsible for parts of both front and backend development.

A connector was created between the web application and a 3rd party government service using an Azure Function that picks up messages posted to Azure Queue for processing. The Azure Function was configured to allow both local development and integration in the build and continuous integration process.

On the front-end side of the ASP.NET Webforms application Steven introduced a Vuejs implementation to leverage modern technologies and speed inside a legacy application and to show a proof of concept to enable a transition over time from the legacy web application to a modern stack. He also guided the team on best practices on how to continue with the transition to a more modern stack.

Finally, a new feature request was developed on both front and back-end side with accompanying unit tests that made use of an API layer on the backend and Telerik controls on the front-end.

Relevant Skills and technologies: C# Xamarin Forms Internet of Things (IoT) .NET Azure Table Storage Azure Functions Design Patterns Asynchronous programming

July 2017 - December 2017

Freelance assignment for Senzyx, an inhouse Vanroey.be project

For Senzyx, an inhouse Vanroey.be project in cooperation with LiCalab, aiming to prevent lower backpain with the use of a smart sensor Steven aided in the development of the Xamarin Forms application for iOS and Android, improving code quality by introducing best practices and design patterns.

To be able to process the high amount of data generated by the sensor Steven worked on an experimental proof of concept to see how Azure Queue and Azure Table Storage could be used to handle processing of messages coming in from an Azure Stream Analytics job. To work with Azure Table Storage Steven created a small library that implemented a generic repository pattern to simplify working with Azure Table Storage data, paging, filtering, sorting, asynchronously loading and writing batches of data etc.

Relevant Skills and technologies: C# Xamarin Forms Internet of Things (IoT) .NET Azure Table Storage Azure Functions Design Patterns Asynchronous programming

July 2017 - December 2017

Freelance assignment for Sirvo commissioned by Vanroey.be

For Sirvo, a health care company focusing on enabling caretakers to spend more time with their clients and improve their digital administration Steven was responsible for communicating with the clients and guiding concept and workgroups to determine requirements and priorities for future development of the Sirvo software solution and translate this into a functional analysis.

Relevant Skills and technologies: Functional Analysis Communication Problem-Solving Negotiation Critical Thinking Organizational skills Listening Prioritizing Conflict Resolution Teamwork Collaboration Research Unified Modeling Language (UML) Project Management

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

2015

Sitecore XP 8.0 Certified Professional Developer
Sitecore Belux INT Belgium Trainer Candidate

2002 - 2003

Specialisation in web technologies
Sint-Jozefscollege Herentals

1997 - 2001

Secondary education
Trade school (Handelsschool) Turnhout

1994 - 1997

Secondary education
Sint-Jozefscollege Turnhout