Lead Developer — CBTW · via STEPHANZYCH
Brussels, Belgium · 2023 – Present
Hands-on lead developer in the technical team that came out of the Cherry Pulp integration, currently four to five engineers. I develop day to day while leading technical direction and the modernisation of how the team builds and ships.
Architecture & technical direction
- Own architecture and technical decisions across concurrent projects: stack choices, project structure, and the boundaries between backend, API and frontend
- Define technical standards, development conventions and code review practice, and drive their adoption across teams
- Maintain and evolve the internal tooling and project boilerplates originally built at Cherry Pulp and still in use within CBTW
- Support developers through review and technical guidance while remaining in the codebase
- Work across distributed international teams, including enterprise environments using Microsoft internal tooling and AWS
- Introduced a shared Docker local development environment (Traefik, PHP, MariaDB, phpMyAdmin) as the common baseline for projects
- Building GitLab CI pipelines and secured containerised deployment on AWS Lightsail, replacing manual and FTP-based deployment and moving off Laravel Forge
- Adding observability with Grafana, Prometheus and Loki
- Rolled out project by project alongside ongoing client delivery: legacy workflows and the new pipeline currently run side by side
Co-Founder / CTO / Head of Frontend — Cherry Pulp
Brussels, Belgium · 2013 – 2024 · acquired by CBTW in 2023, transition completed in 2024
Co-founded Cherry Pulp and helped grow it into a digital agency of around 20 people building custom websites, digital platforms and web applications. My role ran from frontend leadership into technical ownership across the company, hands-on throughout.
Scale & impact
- Delivered 200+ web platforms and digital products
- Helped grow the company from 4 to 20 people
- Supported and mentored development teams, up to 10–12 developers at peak
Technical ownership & delivery
- Designed a modular web delivery approach around Docker, WordPress with Bedrock, structured conventions and custom Forge/Lightsail deployment workflows, making setup faster and delivery more consistent across teams
- Defined technical direction and project architecture across client work: stack selection, project structure, and the boundaries between WordPress or Laravel backends, APIs and JavaScript frontends
- Owned frontend technical direction and the delivery of short-cycle web projects: WordPress from small to medium complexity, Laravel applications where the problem justified it
- Established reusable boilerplates, conventions and CLI tooling that made project setup faster and maintenance predictable over time
- Led technical scoping, estimation and client-facing technical advisory through discovery and delivery
- Took part in technical hiring and onboarding, and set the standards new developers worked to
Representative clients: Unicef · Oxfam · Engie · Delhaize · Telenet · KBC Brussels · Latour & Petit · Cefic · Business Europe · Clear Channel · Monizze · Solidaris · eFarmz · RTL · RTBF
