Martin Van Aken

Joyous coder & coach

Hire Me

Joyous Coding

I like to code & to help others coding.

I worked as a developer, an architect, a technical team leader, a customer contact and often a mix of those. I like to code with people to deliver meaningful, working software.

I've been working in companies from one to several thousands of people, from startups (including one I founded) to corporations. I try to bring the same value everywhere: build projects with the people that are there, with a "delivery", customer-first mentality.

From my startup experiences, I learned the value of delivering fast and often, and to collaborate with the customer in all phases of the project. I think that the less steps/people between the development team and the end user, the best the software will be.

I love coding, but I think business should always come first. I'm not coding for coding - I'm coding to bring value to you.

What I Do

Code & help your team to code.

MVP

I can build your MVP. If you are a business owner with a startup idea, I can sit down with you, help define a Minimal but Viable Product and build it with you, so you can get it into user hands ASAP - meaning next month.

Technical Best Practices

I can help you set up best practices into your team such as unit tests, automated builds, one click deployment. I can take care of the technical side, but also of the human side - this is something that needs to be explained to the team, so that they take ownership of it.

Delivery mentality

I can work with you and your customer to help you deliver more and more often. It starts by putting the customer back in charge, help him to better define his needs without assuming them. Agile cycles ensure regular demos and deployment, ensuring the team that it is on the good track. Finally, it means for each developer to ask himself: "How will the customer benefit from this?" before writing any code.

Experience

Code & help your team to code.

PullReview

Co-Founder / Brussels, BE / 2011 - 2014

PullReview is an automated code review software for Ruby programmer. Having been a practioner and evanglist of good coding practices for years, this was an opportunity to turn my knowledge and experience into a software. Founding a company also teach me about focus, customer development, MVP and in general getting the shortest path from where we are to our next objective.

LeWagon

Lead Coach / Brussels, BE / 2014 -

LeWagon is a coding school founder in Paris in 2013. The main product is a 9-weeks development bootcamp targeted at entrepreneurs and business minded people that lack the skills to build their own web application. We deliver a technical, packed bootcamp focused on helping the candidates to get the required skills to build their MVP.

Swift

Technical Coach / La Hulpe, BE / 2012 - 2015

Swift is the IT backbone of the financial world. I coach a team of developers of both technical and methodology aspects, aiming to transform a team from a maintenance, operational point of view toward a delivery mentality. This means setting up tools and good practices such as continuous delivery, unit and integration tests, sprints and retrospectives.

Education

That was a long time ago.

Master in Economical Sciences

ULB - Graduated: 1999

General economics studies. While I never worked in that field, I still find those useful on a weekly basis. An economical view is useful in most fields including software. What we are doing is always a question of resources (people, time, money) versus the benefit we bring to our users or customers.

Agregation (pedagogical title)

UMH - Graduated: 2001

As part as my first job as a teacher for programming bachelors, I did study at Université de Mons-Hainaut. The content was mostly practical and decidated to pedagogy. With the small group of students, we did learn and exchange experience about teaching classes, organizing lessons, etc.

Contact

Any question?

Contact Info

51 rue Zeecrabbe 1180 Brussels

(+32) 486 899 652

martin@joyouscoding.com