About

Nicolas Overloop is a full-stack ruby on rails freelancer and has started couchcontrol.com after graduating as a MSc. Computer science engineering from Ghent University.

Nicolas enjoys building beautiful products and has helped multiple clients achieve beautiful, usable products. One client has left this testimonial on his linkedin profile.

“Nicolas joined our project when things couldn’t seem any bleaker. He evaluated the situation, developed a way to solve the problems, and solved them.

Nicolas is super pragmatic, business-minded, and focuses on what is needed to move the business forward. A strong, all around CTO type that would be an asset for any organization.

Without hesitation, if I need someone to build a web/mobile application, the first person I’d go to is Nicolas.”

 

March 4, 2012 – William Flanagan

Skillset

I pick up new languages and techniques all the time and this list will probably be outdated by the time you read this.

Web basics
HTML
HTML5
jQuery
css
css3
sass
compass
haml
JSON

Programming Languages
Ruby
Java
Javascript
Python (scientific use only)
C

I’ve had some exposure to Obj-C, C# and C++ but I don’t consider myself a capable programmer in those languages.

Web Frameworks (in order of preference)
Rails
Sinatra
CakePHP
some exposure to Java EE

Mobile App Frameworks
Titanium Appcelerator
Rhomobile
some exposure to native iphone development

Databases
MySQL, postgresql, sqlite (SQL)
Mongodb (document storage)
Redis (key/value or datastructure)
neo4j (graph-database, still learning)

Testing
Rspec
Guard (continuous integration testing)
FactoryGirl
Capybara + Selenium
JUnit
some exposure to cucumber

Version control
Git
Mercurial
SVN

Random things
Heroku
Eventmachine
XML/XSLT/XPATH
Prawn (PDF creation)
LaTeX
Node.js
Wordpress
LAMP stack

System administration
I manage my own servers until I started to use heroku, but I did maintain the ZeusWPI network which has a client network and a server network. Maintaining the dns, apache, mailman, syslog-ng collector, LDAP user authentication, setting up postfix, some firewall rules and creating ssh tunnels to avoid my uni’s broadband limitations.

Experience with awk, sed, perl and advanced find and grep commands still allow me to slice and dice data quickly to be loaded into db’s for querying.
Unix-systems only.

Editors of choice
VIM
Textmate

Machine learning
I don’t claim to be an expert in this and I have not used ML techniques commercially yet.
Known techniques: Reservoir computing (recurrent neural network), CNN (convolutional neural network), logistic regression, multilayer perceptron, simple perceptrons (not really useful)… clustering methods such as KNN (K-nearest neighbor), GMM( Gaussian mixture models) and more simple hierarchical clustering methods.

I have worked with computer vision (openCV) in python

I did play around with apache mahout once but I winded up using a third party service instead.

Soft skills
I have been president of a fraternity and led a team of 18, after that I led a team of 8 engineers to architect, design and implement a robot warfare game with legominds robots.

Bilingual Dutch (native) and English

And of course a client of mine called me “super pragmatic, business-minded, and focuses on what is needed to move the business forward. A strong, all around CTO type that would be an asset for any organization.”

Did I mention I have a MSc in Computer Science Engineering degree?

Curriculum Vitae