About Me
On July 18, 1984 I was born in Amersfoort the Netherlands, while my brother followed 4 years later. My mother is from the southern caribbean island of Curaçao, and my father was born in Bonaire and raised in Aruba. In January of 1992 my family and I moved from the Netherlands to Bonaire. There I attended primary school and highschool. Since my child-hood I enjoyed playing sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, as well as activities like biking, fishing and swimming.
While attending after school programs during my pre-teen years I got acquainted with computers. But I started to show more interest in computers around the time that my parents bought a desktop computer for our home. More of my friends around that time also got computers at their homes, and more and more households started to get 56K dialup internet connections. Now I was into playing videogames on the computer and chatting on ICQ with friends, downloading and trying out software, etc. My Dad had his own business and I started helping him with the creation of invoices (using back then, the popular WordPerfect application) on the computer for his clients. My parents noticed my enthousiam with computers, so they signed me up for a few basic computer courses for me to attend on Saturday's. Most of the time I would be the only teenager attending the course, in a room full of adults. lol :-)
QBASIC was my first coding experience in the Information Technology class at highschool. Soon after that I started to learn to write basic HTML by following online guides. In the last years of Highschool I figured out that I wanted to attend college and learn more about the internet, computers and programming.
Keep scrolling down to read more about my journey through the world of Information & Communication Technology.
Education
Radius College
Associate of Science (A.S.), Information & Communication Technology•2002-2005
Work
Pinnacle
Web Development Team Lead•Jan 2014 - Present
Full-time
Location: Willemstad, Curaçao
www.pinnacle.com
Pinnacle
Junior Software Engineer•Feb 2009 - Dec 2009
Graduation Project & Thesis
Location: Willemstad, Curaçao
www.pinnacle.com
Pinnacle
Junior Software Engineer•Aug 2008 - Dec 2008
Internship
Location: Willemstad, Curaçao
www.pinnacle.com
Pinnacle
IT Support Technician•Nov 2006 - Dec 2009
Part-time
Location: Willemstad, Curaçao
www.pinnacle.com
Chassé Theater
IT Support Technician•Aug 2004 - Jan 2005
Internship
Location: Breda, Netherlands
www.chasse.nl
Skills
Here is a summary of my skill levels.
I consider myself a developer that is strong in web, mobile and backend technologies. But because of my past education and work experience, I am also comfortable in other areas like working with Servers, Cloud Services, Windows OS, MacOS, IP networks and computer hardware in general.
BoticaNaWarda Mobile App
I wanted to teach myself how to build Mobile Applications for iOS and Android platforms. So I took the time to explore these platforms their tooling. This ended up being my first mobile app.
Fundashon Wega di Number Bonaire Mobile App
Fundashon Wega di number Bonaire is a government organization in Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean. The Fundashon Wega di number Bonaire offers fun and excitement for all who play, with new games, bigger prizes and more winners.
Hype Marketing & Events from Bonaire took over the management FWNB's website www.bonairelottey.com. FWNB wanted to expand the website and offer more to it's players. Hype Marketing & Events reached out to me. I was more then happy to work on this project.
The project consisted out of 3 deliverables- 1. Website expansion to display winning numbers results. (Build with PHP, MYSQL)
- 2. Winning Number Results Manager Web Application that would be used internally to Create, Read, Update and Delete results and send out Notifications to App users. (Build with PHP, MYSQL)
- 3. Mobile App that would show their existing mobile website on the main screen, have support for notifications and allow users to look up results by date.
Integrity Tax & Accounting B.V. Project
Integrity Tax & Accounting B.V. (formerly De Haseth & Partners) is a privately owned full-service tax and accounting firm with more than 25 years of service history on the island of Curaçao.
Back in 2016 the company wanted to update it's outdated IT infrastructure. Employees also needed to work with the same Tax and Accounting software and be able to share documents. Employees also need to be able to work remotely.
The project consisted out of a few deliverables- 1. Do research for the Network and hardware upgrades that were needed for the office.
- 2. Find suppliers on the island for the server hardware and Software.
- 3. Learn to work with Windows Server 2012, Setup Domain and VPN
- 3. Configure employee workstations to be able to access file shares and have VPN access.
- 4. Configure the Tax and Accounting software so that it's data is stored on a central file share on the Server.
- 5. Configure Windows Server 2012 built-in back-up solution for workstations and important data.
Fast forward to 2018, a couple of years past and I adviced the company to move their physical server and data to the cloud. This move would bring cost savings on not having to run and maintain your own hardware, and peace of mind about your data security and recovery. So I made an effort to learn to work with Azure and mirror the exisitng physical infrastructure in the cloud. So now data would be geographically backed up in a different regions, and a new Windows Server VM can be spinned up easily from the backups in the cloud in the event that the current server fails.
The project consisted out of a few deliverables- 1. Learn to work with the Azure Cloud
- 2. Read best practices when it comes to setting up multi-user Windows Server in the cloud
- 3. Learn to work with File Shares on the Azure platform
- 4. Move Accounting & Tax software and data over to the VM on Azure.
FTER9 startup
Food businesses want to focus on the food and service they provide to customers. Consumers in today's world are looking for easier, cheaper and faster ways to get the food that they want. So, FTER9 is that bridge between food businesses and customers. FTER9 is a startup company founded by a group of guys who love Technology.
A Couple of friends and me played around with the idea of automating the ordering process for food trucks and restaurants on the island. We started this project with a few businesses just to see if the concept would stick and develop it further based on client feedback.
Fridays Baby Truck Mobile App
Fridays Baby Truck wanted to expand it's online presense with a mobile App that allow it's customers to place orders using their mobile phones.
Automated ordering saves time, and the mobile app allows the business to have a direct communication channel with it's customers through push notifications improving on their customer engagement.