About

tl;dr about me: I’m a PHP artisan, full stack dev and server wrangler. I am a freelance developer/consultant & working on making Chief Tools a collection of first class tools I wish I had when I started out.

About the artisan part

I love the Laravel PHP framework and have built quite some applications (both private and public) with it (since version 3 all the way up to the bleeding edge). Have any questions? Hit me up on Twitter or shoot me an email.

About the full stack dev and server wrangler part

Chief Tools

I'm currently building Chief Tools which is a collection of my many side-projects, although it got a bit out of hand and I think I can call them regular projects at this point. If you are curious you can check out what it is al about on the about page.

Simulise

I co-founded Simulise and worked on it for a little over 10 years before moving on to new adventures. Simulise is an SaaS we built for schools where students can show who they are instead of only getting a list of grades, a little excerpt from the site tells it best:

Students have to present themselves better than ever. After the student's formal education has finished, employers and clients expect to see insight into the skills of a person and want to know what to expect from a candidate. Educational institutions are expected to give skills a permanent place in the curriculum. This is why the online portfolio of Simulise makes those skills transparent for students and teachers -both during school time and afterwards. Simulise

My responsibility was running the "IT" side of the company, some would call this the CTO role but for our size this was never my official title. This ranged from (leading) the development of our SaaS application (which I built from the ground up) to keeping our servers going and keep them going fast.

Hosting

On the side I run a small hosting company, founded by me, called Alboweb. I host a large variety of sites, from very small sites to some as big as >14M page views a day (although these don't run on the standard shared servers of course).

With Alboweb I provide shared and managed hosting services or consult on bigger setups. It is a great way to keep my sysadmin skills up-to-date and pet my ego when I look at our beautiful uptime reports 🤓.

Consultancy

In the few free hours I have I do consulting and work on a freelance basis as Devalex. I work with very little to very big companies on tasks ranging from setting up infrastructure, reviewing their code or to simply to step in to get sh*t done.

Sentry

I'm also one of the core developers for the Sentry PHP SDK and the Laravel integration (and unofficially also the WordPress integration). If you don't know Sentry and build any kind of application, go check them out to level up your error reporting (I am not paid to say that).

iCulture

I also work and worked as resident code monkey @iCulture, the largest (and best of course) Dutch Apple focused news site. Here I worked to make WordPress less awkward and better/faster/stronger for the writers and readers. The site is built on WordPress, but also uses the Laravel Lumen framework (to make our iOS apps blazing fast 🔥) and Elasticsearch (as our awesome search backbone).

Get in contact

If you want to talk to me you can shoot me an email or hit me up on Twitter @stayallive (yeah, that’s with 2 l’s) or on Mastodon: @alex@bouma.social (and yes I host that myself too).

Want to share server access or sharing something that needs to be secret, use one of my public keys.