About me Me, myself & I

Hi, I'm Kevin. Passionate web developer, enthusiast LEGO builder (AFOL1), gadget freak and occasionally sporty too. Happily maried, and living in the Brussels area.

Since the age of 152 I'm passionated by the web. I had my first PC at the same age. It didn't take too long or I was building my first website in Microsoft FrontPage. Black background, limegreen text in Comic Sans MS and animated gifs overload. Those were the days. To make it public I used the well known Geocities.

As funny as it sounds now, back then it was a big deal for me. I created something that someone else at the other end of the world could see. How cool is that! So I knew what to do. Work hard to become an IT scientist. I was blessed. Some of us still don't know what they really want to do for a living, and I was 15 and I knew it.

People grow up. So do I. Started with a PC, evolved into Linux and became adult with a Mac. I find my way around all three of those systems, but my experience is that you can achieve so much more in less time with a Mac.

So, what am I?

Good question. In the world of web we are at a point that no one can be good at all. So I made some choices based on experiences. I am a very good frontend developer. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Am I the best? No. But I work hard to become the best. No day passes or I'm looking into new or existing techniques to become a better developer. I also am a good PHP developer. Not as good as frontend, but more than good enough to be part of your PHP developers team. PHP is my first love when it comes to dynamic websites.

And what am I not?

Easy. I'm not a Java developer. I still know some things or two from the time I was learning it at school, and I have some work experience many years ago. So I can do small changes when I need to. But I do not have the pretense to call myself a Java developer. I am also not a .NET, C or Objective-C developer. So please don't contact me for such opportunities. You are wasting both our times.

I do not design either. Yes, I know my way around color usage, and yes I know how a good website looks like. But I don't do advanced designs. It's about getting the right people for the job, and I'm not a designer. I implement designs. Big difference.

But I want to be …

I'm very interested in React Native, so that's what I'm currently learning. You can say it's too early to hire me for a React Native opportunity, or it must be that you can give me the time at the job to grow with it. I am a fast learner, and I have a great JavaScript background. It's totally up to you.

  1. Adult Fan Of LEGO
  2. I was born in the same year as the Macintosh, so do the math if you want to know ☺

Expertise Batman would be jealous

  1. HTML & CSS

    Creating mobile first layouts using the BEM methodology and following the W3C standards. From simple layouts up to the most advanced ones using the latest techniques without forgetting about supporting the stupid not so smart browsers.

  2. JavaScript

    The less the better. My number one goal when building a website is to make everything work without JavaScript, and then enhance it. Progressive Enhancement. Make it performant, secure and clean. Make it work.

  3. PHP & MySQL

    My go to scripting language for personal projects that need to be dynamic. I used to build everything myself, but in the meantime I am klevr enough to use the Symfony framework. When I need a database, I go for MySQL. PHP and MySQL grew up together, it's a (cheap) killer combination.

  4. Build systems

    I am a good developer. So I am a lazy developer. A good build system helps me being lazy. Gulp. Save a file, and the system takes care of it. Sass is compiled into CSS. JavaScript tests run. SVG icons are transformed into an iconfont. Images are optimized. Browser refreshes. I can work so much faster, and there is always checking someone if my HTML, CSS and JavaScript is by the rules. Love it.

  5. Agile

    Scrum. Kanban. Sprints. Daily stand-up. Retrospective. Product backlog. Product owner. Planning. Ok, enough. I know my way around Agile. I know what it takes to complete a sprint, and what the flow is. I do it on a daily base at work and I'm planning to do it at home too when I have kids.

  6. Test Driven Development

    Yes, I test my code. It's not the most awesome thing to do, but it helps a lot during development. When writing code you don't want to spend time going through the same scenarios over and over again to see if everything still works. No, you write some good tests that do all that for you. If your tests cover all possible scenarios, the end to end testing is a breeze. You can focus more on UI and other details. Don't get me wrong, you should still check all the written scenarios yourself, but it will go much faster.

  7. The Need for Speed

    No, I don't mean the video game. Or the movie. Although I played the NFS video games a lot. What I really mean is the performance of websites. Use a properly configuration for delivering static resources, gzip, caching headers, … It's impressive how so little changes can have such a massive effect. Last time I checked this current site had a 97 speed score on Google PageSpeed, and that's without the critical CSS part that I'm working on. It can mean the difference between a visitor that left the site before it was loaded because he was on a bad connection, and that same visitor who becomes a client after a succesful page visit.

Skills By the numbers

Frontend

HTML5

CSS3

JavaScript (ES5)


jQuery

bean / bonzo / qwery / reqwest

SASS / LESS

PhantomJS / Jasmine / Sinon.JS

Gulp / Grunt

Twitter Bootstrap

Thymeleaf

Twig

Backend

PHP

Java


Symfony 2 / 3

Projects Yes, I've been around

Education You won't say, but I'm educated