In spite of the abundance of frameworks and utilities one cannot escape core JavaScript programming to tie it all together. During the last 3+ years of JavaScript development I have gained both the theoretical knowledge as well as the hands-on experience with all major concepts relevant for JavaScript programming: closures, continuation/promise based programming with jQuery deferred, exception handling, animation chains, etc.

My JavaScript of choice has been backbone.js. Together with underscore.js and jQuery this provides everything a core JS programmer needs. In addition to these frameworks I have adopted Twitter Bootstrap to take care of responsive design, complemented where necessary with jQuery UI. I use WordPress for Content Management and the NinjaOnline development framework to tie it all together. Works like a charm!

I have to admit, design is not my strongest point. However, since I started working with Twitter Bootstrap my skills in this area have improved significantly. Its grid system is magnificent and takes most of the effort of "responsive designing" out of your hands. Combine this with a few clever media queries and you are well underway with a fully responsive website or application.

The software I develop is typically "front-end driven" with a relatively large amount of application logic deeply embedded in the database. I make extensive use of stored procedures, functions and triggers, with more or less equally senior skills on MySQL, MS SQL and Sybase. Little Oracle unfortunately...

I started my career back in 1998 working with Telecom Billing & Collections applications. The core of these applications was the Rating Engine, which took care of the application of tariff plans over large volumes of Call Detail Records by means of highly optimized stored procedures using carefully elaborated processing strategies. The RDBMS at the time was Sybase. Further on in my career I have worked with large customer/order MS-SQL databases, again in the area of complex data processing procedures. Through this I have mastered the art of tuning & optimization from diagnosing performance problems through the entire stack of an application from client-pc through the network and server hardware (and storage) up to its database queries.

I have experience with implementing backup & recovery strategies for medium to large databases, and for MySQL, MS-SQL and Sybase. For MySQL I have written custom "full backup" functionality by combining stored procedures and shell scripts to dump large tables in batches of 100.000 records. I'm not a DBA and it's not my specialty, but I am able to devise "fit for purpose" strategies and implement these using the appropriate techniques.

I started developing PHP in 2006. This was about the time when the first public PHP frameworks started to emerge but these were in their early stages so we decided to build our own. We learned tremendously about session management and file & class loading, we implemented a layered MVC design and wrote all kinds of utilities. Today I have solid PHP experience across the entire range of webserver functionality.

We have solid experience with web service development ranging from simple JSON endpoints to full-swing SOAP interfaces. Some of the services we created required neat tricks and/or sophisticated caching mechanisms to deliver the required performance. A good example is delivering small sets of random items that meet complex selection criteria out of a very large database table. Another example is a set of synchronization services that were subject to complex business rules.