Services

Once in a while I help people out with their projects, let me tell you what I can also do for you:

Get it fixed
I actually enjoy hunting bugs  and exploring unknown code.  I can work with your existing code base without being obsessed with refactoring it for weeks first.

Manipulation and integration of financial data

Even though almost all records that you need for your accounting are digital now, there is a lot of manual labour involved in actually using them to do your accounting. I’ve created pragmatic solutions to greatly reduce the amount of work involved in entering data.

Examples:

  • extracting order numbers from bank payment records and matching them to invoices
  • Determining VAT charges from PayPal payment records
  • Processing PayPal exports to fit standard accounting system formats
  • Using APIs and conversion to standard importable formats (for e.g. Twinfield) to ease data entry

For this I mostly use Python as it is cross platform, provides many tools for data processing and also allows to create a GUI for those that need it.  I’ll use  https://github.com/michielvv/lazyaccounting  as a starting point.

AWS Cloud consulting

  • setting up auto-scaling, load balancing using Amazon Web Services
  • identify single-point-of-failures
  • identify things that don’t scale (e.g. usage of local file storage for file uploads)
  • automating deployment

Tooling:  Fabric,  Boto, Chef

Performance consulting

(Web)applications are usually not developed with a lot of realistic data and traffic from the start.  As things grow, it’s easy to run into bottlenecks. These can for example be bottlenecks in resource usage, (website) load time, scalability. To resolve those bottlenecks there are many tools:

  • Apply in-memory technology such as Redis
  • Partial loading approaches
  • De-coupling using queues and background jobs
  • De-normalization of database tables
  • Eliminating database queries from loops
  • Combining memcache/redis requests into batches
  • API optimization: reduce the number of requests to achieve a goal by introducing utility methods and improve the data structure returned on each request

Development

I like to get involved in all aspects of product development, picking up tasks as needed. I’m currently available for development related projects. To get an idea where I would fit in, I’ve listed the most interesting projects I’ve worked on in the past 10 years.

Web/Backend Development

  • Full-stack development on several SaaS solutions (PHP/JavaScript/CSS) most notably observu.com and picturepush.com
  • Maintenance and extension of an existing Python backend ( Flask / SQLAlchemy )

Operational

  • Perl based server monitoring agent for Observu.com
  • API performance and scalability testing using JMeter
  • Realistic web performance and scalability testing using Selenium

App Development

  • Maintenance on an existing HTML5 based cross-platform app (Backbone.js/CSS3/jQuery)
  • Bug-fixing, maintenance and implementing significant new features on a native iOS app using Objective C
  • Bug-fixing, maintenance and extension of native Android app using Java
  • Bug-fixing, maintenance and implementing significant new features on a Xamarin.forms based app (C#, sqlite)

In general I am able to quickly pick up existing projects, not only in code but also the client/user requirements. Doing so I can work through design related feedback quickly to get a project closer to a releasable state.

If you believe I can help you out with your project, send me a mail at michiel@vanvlaardingen.com so we can discuss the details.