Joost Baaij, born 16 September 1975

To get in touch with me, please use the contact form.

Qualifications

Freelance web developer since 2001. I have senior experience using Ruby on Rails (core contributor) and come from a Perl-PHP, Java/J2EE background. Master in content management, architect of many custom CMS implementations. I have a passion for content in the broadest sense of the word, be it music, film, interviews or photography, and I am very good at bringing that content to the web. I also enjoy the sales part of my work, meeting prospects, doing pitches and brainstorming with clients even when I don’t get to do the actual work. I am proponent of agile development, object-oriented everything, web standards and open source software. I have extensive knowledge of Linux and database servers and come from an Informix/BSDi background. Email me at joost@spacebabies.nl, see me working with rails or drop a comment anywhere on this blog.

Experience

Content Management System GO Magazine (2001 until 2009)

Large online magazine about electronic music and DJ culture in Dutch. Originally coded by me in J2EE, ported to Ruby on Rails in 2005 and recently relaunched in Rails 3.1 using the asset pipeline. I also built an option to render everything to static files, to allow serving the content indefinitely. Do check the HTML source. I think it represents the current pinaccle of web technology. www.gomagazine.nl

Lead developer, Tour Top 100 (2011)

Small WordPress 3.2 website featuring a hundred Tour de France-related songs. The songs are broadcast on national radio and this website features them with a video. I love that WordPress uses oEmbed. It’s a fantastic system for embedding content, both technically and from editors point of view. It’s in HTML5 with all images as data URIs in the CSS. This has a huge effect on load time. tourtop100.radio1.nl

Lead developer, Radiolab (2011)

WordPress Multisite (previously known as WPMU) about experimental Dutch radio. This is the first website I have done that’s fully responsive. This means there is no separate mobile version, but the mobile website is integrated into the normal one. When you visit the website using a phone, the page is modified to fit on a smaller screen. In the case of Radiolab we went from two columns to one and we changed the flow of many elements. Try it yourself! radiolab.nl

Lead developer, De Stemming van Nederland (2011)

Microsite about Dutch elections, this one had the shortest turnaround time for me yet. From conception to deployment in the scope of days is pretty cool. Add to that full W3C Strict compliance and tons of social widgets such as Twitter, Google Maps and Flickr integration and this is one pretty cool little website. Built in WordPress 3 using my fully up-to-date WP3 theme engine. www.destemmingvannederland.nl

Lead developer, Expedition Chemistry (2010)

For Stichting C3 I developed this WordPress 3 website aimed at children. It contains a lot of information about chemistry and has the goal of making this knowledge more accessible for primary education students. One of the most interesting aspects are the experiments you can perform at home. I used mostly prebuilt templates and standard WordPress functionality which allowed the customer to go online in a small amount of time. www.expeditionchemistry.nl

Backend, Panda Maas (2010)

Developed the back end of this Flash site aimed at children. Panda Maas is the children’s mascot of Maasstad Ziekenhuis in Rotterdam. He lives in this website, where you can meet the doctors, ask questions, hear jokes, download drawings and wander through the hospital. The entire website is Rails 3 on SQLite with a great deal of cache optimizations. www.pandamaasstadziekenhuis.nl

Lead developer, Z@ppelin (2009 until now)

The younger sister of Z@PP, Z@ppelin is a TV channel aimed at children up to 7 years of age. The channel was rebranded in 2009 and with it came an entirely new website. I built it from scratch using the latest RoR tricks of the trade. The back end is formed by my custom CMS which is now becoming a very slick and versatile tool. It has full spec coverage and communicates to various flash apps using XML. www.zappelin.nl

Backend, Megamythen (2010)

Developed a custom back-end for this online game in Flash, which was developed by Daniël van Gils (Kamer Blauw Licht). All front/back and communication is REST JSON, which is easy for Rails but apparently hard for Flash. The game is a journey through ancient Greece where you meet mythical Gods like Apollo and Hercules. Lots of elements in Flash are actually controlled by the data on the back end. www.megamythen.nl

Lead developer, Canon van de Kindertelevisie (2009)

The definitive list of Dutch Children’s TV is a website built in Rails 2.3 with a very basic commenting section. In XHTML Strict it represents a further refinement of the custom CMS I built. The back-end is extremely pleasant to use as it focuses on tasks and leaves out all UI elements not related to a task. It will be the first major platform for the newly developed Silverlight player, developed by the public broadcasters. www.canonvandekindertelevisie.nl

Lead developer, Radio 6 (2009 until now)

In 2009 I developed several plugins for Radio 6, the national music station for Jazz and World. The plugins show the Electronic Programme Guide and let visitors browse past broadcasts and listen to the streams. In 2010 the entire website was restyled and rebuilt from scratch by me in WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) I continue maintenance of the website and add new features every month. www.radio6.nl

Lead developer, Radio 1 (2008 until now)

Netherland’s biggest radio station for news and sports went live with the first Ruby on Rails installation used by the public broadcasters. I built the entire site from scratch. Almost everything is resourcefully routed. Performance is a huge concern since this website sees peak loads during major events like Tour de France. Runs on a server cluster with many Mongrel front ends and a custom tuned MySQL. Noteworthy are the huge number of feeds coming into the system every five minutes; almost 80 in total. www.radio1.nl

Lead developer, Z@PP (2008 until now)

TV Channel for children and a large web community about its shows. Took over developing this CMS from Zapp employees and built and expanded immensely since then. Designed Single Sign-On for various third-party apps such as the mixer. REST API used extensively by suppliers and partners. Every show on this channel can be watched via this website; an API link to the Electronic Programme Guide is present. www.zapp.nl

Weet jij veel… van mensenrechten? (2010)

Small website about human rights aimed at children. It is accompanied with a survey, sent out to most primary schools in Netherlands, and an online interview course. This website details twenty human rights and asks participants about their level of knowledge, in order to increase awareness. Entirely done in WordPress 2.9 with a neat HTML5 frontend. This website marks the first one I did in HTML5 from the start. It was also built with SEO and accessibility in mind.

Tech Lead, Bemba (2007 and 2008)

Systems architect and technical lead of this social service, which enabled you to share and find cool content online. “Share web pages and videos with your friends on Facebook, Hyves, Twitter and your blog.” The app ran Rails 2.0 on a cluster of 4 servers (two front end, two database). Ruby on Rails development done the right way, fully tested, using Subversion and migrations. Bemba has many calls to APIs such as Google Charts, web thumbnailer, pingback/trackback and the social services listed.

L8R (2007 until 2009)

Fun little web application that lets you send email later. If I had a boss, I could use it to schedule emails in weekends to get major kudos for my “work ethic”. As it is, I send actual emails to my clients and they expect no less. So I use it for other, more mundane, stuff. Technical and functional design, Ruby on Rails 2.0 with 90% RESTful architecture. www.l8r.nu

Oorkaan (2009)

Small website for this cultural organisation in Amsterdam. Oorkaan is a concert promotor aimed at small children; they bill famous classical artists and create unique performances for humans aged 4 – 12 (and over). I completely replaced their static HTML with a dynamic WordPress 2.9 front- and back-end. The design of the website called for some smart templating; which I have done completely inside the bounds of the WordPress theming system. The concert calendar I created features a customized ticketing system and Google maps integration. www.oorkaan.nl

nuPLAY (2008)

Ruby on Rails app  for creating live 3D audio/video performances and interactive installations.

Web consultancy for Hypotheeklead (2006-2007)

Consultancy and architecture for large-scale PHP applications. www.hypotheeklead.nl

KRO Kindertijd (2006)

Development of CMS and Flash Remoting API for kids community. www.kindertijd.nl

Webdeveloper at Waxtrapp (2005-2006)

Design and implementaion of large scale web applications such as www.omroep.nl. Design of critical real-time applications with iDeal payments and xml-rpc APIs. Core development; code management; bugtracking.

Web-to-print CMS voor newspaper Amsterdam Weekly (2003-2009)

Custom CMS in J2EE on Tomcat driving this cultural publication. All events are stored in a database and coupled with XData-Quark Express, allowing for one-click publishing in a variety of formats.

SwetsNet: Informix specialist (2001)

Consultancy for Informix database. Architecture and development of >5 million full text articles via WebBlade. Managing role in online team.

Employee at Barito Innovators and Euromedia

Resposibilities included quality assurance, determination of deliverables, communication with clients, architecture of project documentation, server and router administration and development of backend databases.