As the title presents, my name is Etienne Bruines (24 years old). As someone having studied Artificial Intelligence at the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands), I am very interested in enabling computer systems to handle more complex tasks. For the fun of it, I followed both the curriculum for Computer Science and that of Artificial Intelligence for the first one and a half year.
My passion currently lies with web-development, where I have been working for the past 11 years.
About my personal life: I've been happily married to my wife for about 5 years now. Part of my spare time I spent creating a game engine in the programming language Go. Currently living in Nordenham, Germany .
ContactAs of January 1st, 2017, I am happy to be a part of the core development team of Webcustoms IT Solutions GmbH in Bremen, Germany.
Jan. 2017 — Now
Daily tasks include the programming of Shopware Plugins, integrating shops with marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, as well as creating a Continuous-Integration (CI) platform from scratch.
Training and assisting colleagues in programming, web development in general and usage of various tools is also part of the day-to-day work.
Oct. 2016 — Dec. 2017
Performing various tasks ranging from developing the back-end for a website, to creating a webscraper, to giving advice about building, deploying and maintaining an API. This also includes writing the occasional blog article and figuring out how to deploy service with zero downtime using various cloud services (think Docker, container orchestration, etc.)
Sept. 2015 — Jan. 2017
Engo is where I put most of my spare programming time, as part of the EngoEngine team. It is a game-engine written in Go, aimed to make creating games easier. It does so by using the programming language Go, as well as allowing easy cross-platform builds (Desktop, Browser, and soon mobile). My tasks include organizing issues, creating pull requests to add new features / bugfixes and actively reviewing other PRs. In doing so, I'm also actively engaged in discussions with team members and users of the engine, to keep improving the engine. We're currently a small team of 4-6 active developers.
As of June 2016, this has been limited to issue handling and communicating. Much of the heavy lifting has been performed and I have been forced to spend more time on other projects.
Jan. 2010 — Oct. 2015
In 2010 I started with my own company called HuperWebs, which was focused on creating and maintaining websites. Doing this, I have had extensive hands-on experience with a lot of different environments (both Linux and Windows servers), using different languages for webservices (ASP.NET, Java, Python, Go, PHP, C), as well as the languages involved in the actual websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript). Unfortunately, in October 2015 I had to stop due to the excessive time my education required of me.
Sept. 2015 — Aug. 2016
The Computer Science department asked me to develop a web-interface to work around the disliked Blackboard environment. Requirements were: usable from mobile phone, integration with existing student credentials (university-wide), and it should store/retrieve any data to/from the university Blackboard environment. The interface allowed for additional features Blackboard does not (such as attendance, code-highlighting in feedback, and more).
Sept. 2013 — Aug. 2015
For several years, I have been assisting the teachers of the course Imperative Programming. My job was to verify the assignments students handed in, and give feedback regarding code quality and correctness. This course taught the basics of C/C++ programming, although most of the principles were also applicable to other imperative languages.
Sept. 2014 — Jan. 2015
As part of my Artificial Intelligence course, I was working for Hyperleap for a few months, improving their database (MySQL) structure and highly optimizing their queries, as well as implement some methods to filter out duplicate / incorrect information — speed was key here.
2012 — 2013
As a part-time employee, I was responsible for helping customers within the wholesale business. My job was also to ensure the website was fully-functioning, up-to-date and accessible to a lot of people. I also had to ensure the website was able to print pricing lists in PDF format, with different prices and layouts for each customer. This system I had to create from scratch.
Next to the continues research whilst working, and the talks that are available online, I also received some offline education.
Febr. 2018
This one-day training provided me with the basics of dealing with the B2B-Suite within Shopware for enterprise customers, focusing on extending and customizing the workflow from start to end.
This training continued upon the 'Shopware Advanced Developer Training', which I received in-house with Webcustoms.
Sept. 2012 — Aug. 2016
This brought me up-to-speed on the current state of artificial intelligence in research. Several topics were part of the curriculum: robotics, visual recognition, machine learning, data mining, search, planning — and many more.
For my BA Thesis, I looked at the Cold-Start problem within a Recommendation System: making predictions for new items, new users, and a combination of the two. I applied this to the sales history of the Rossmann stores.
Sept. 2012 — Aug. 2014
Alongside my Artificial Intelligence curriculum, I also followed the (slightly overlapping) curriculum at the Computer Science department. This gave me additional knowledge on Requirements Engineering, mathematics, security (basics) and experience in additional programming languages. I successfully completed the "Propedeuse" - the first year of the course.
The code following the language, is according to the European Framework of Reference for Languages .
Primary focus is on web development, but the following provides a more detailed overview: