Hi there, I'm Nick.
A Dutch web developer from Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Experienced with over 17 years of working on hundreds of projects for digital agencies in many roles and languages.
Located near Rotterdam in The Netherlands, but working on-site or remotely is not a problem.
Please feel free to contact me.
I started as backend developer after graduating as Bachelor of ICT.
I now speak Ruby (on Rails), PHP, XML, HTML, CSS, Javascript and much more. I have a lot of experience with MySQL, Postgres, REST, API, Nginx, DNS, DevOps skills and the Google tools.
Developed a lot of sites in ActiveAdmin, pH8, Wordpress, Expression Engine, Magento2 and some other exotic CMSes.
I love puzzles and getting things done.
As the Service Manager I've gaine a lot of project manager experience while managing multiple projects for multiple (remote / international) teams.
Keeping track of all wishes and the team progress to implement them can be a hell of a job. But on fire we can make suggestions and (strict) choices together with you to get more than the minimum viable product within time and budget.
If you need someone that can connect a development team and the stakeholders for a project or product. You don't want a proxy, but somebody that speaks both languages and can erase blocking issues and possible misunderstandings about user stories, priorities and goals. All for the best results and improving the dev team velocity.
Bouwend Nederland is thé influential business organization for construction and infrastructure companies. The association has approximately 4300 companies as members and represents the interests of these members at local, national and European level with governments. Next to that, Bouwend Nederland provides her members support for operational management, organizes network meetings and training courses on various relevant topics and offers many financial benefits.
The website has a public section and a MyBNL environment in which the employees of the member companies can log in for the large amounts of protected content.
The public part is used to meet the information obligation to also give non-members sufficient insights about, for example, new legislation regarding construction and infrastructure. The public section is also designed to encourage potential members to become members.
In the MijnBNL section behind login, Bouwend Nederland offers many (external) tools such as a labor cost calculator and an extensive building weather module.
The big challenge for this project is the link with Windex, the system in which the membership administration is kept and information about trainings and other meetings is managed by Bouwend Nederland.
The required data is synchronized with imports twice a day. With a very large amount of data in different models, the limits of the pH8.CMS and the website have been explored. For performance optimization, caching has been built into various layers of the application.
Alex Nieuwenhuis of Bouwend Nederland - Recognizability and insight into the added value of membership are essential for binding existing and new members to the association. The website of Bouwend Nederland has provided us with excellent support here, especially in the MyBNL environment after login, but also with aspects such as good search engine optimization and a recognizable look and feel of the site.
An indispensable factor in this was and is the professionalism of Nick, in the development of the site itself and in strategic thinking.
Interesting, right? Contact me and I will gladly tell you more about it.
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Profile tyrecenter has a website built for consumers in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Two main funnels are essential; one is selling tyres and wheels and the second is making appointments with a Profile workshops for car maintenance and for instance the winter tyre change.
The technical challenges for this platform were in the communication with the 8 external data sources, each with their own peculiarities ;-) To name a few: Daily synchronisation of thousands of products and prices, stock updates, discounts and promotions with or without vouchercodes, wheel-tyre combinations with adjusted montage prices and also alerts to the user for their cars periodic technical inspection.
This site is a high traffic site with big peaks during the first snowy days in the autumn/winter and after sending promotional newsletters. Because of the external data sources, extra attention has been paid to the UX for the Profile sites in order to keep the waiting as bearable as possible during this peaks.
Interesting, right? Contact me and I will gladly tell you more about it.
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A multi-site platform has been built for this worldwide producer of medical (measuring) equipment (for the Europe / Russia / Middle East / Africa division). Within the platform, sites for at least 25 countries and languages are currently being managed. In order to meet the wishes of the many language-specific editorial staffs, all components have been set up in such a modular way that an infinite number of content blocks with their own specific design can be added per item. Also version management and a preview function are built in, with extensive possibilities for SEO optimization
The platform is built in Ruby on Rails. The backend in which the editors work is custom built with Active Admin.
Many different sites on one platform also means a lot of visitors. Much has been done on the performance. Two seperate web servers are active with a master-slave database synchronization. Product images are 'shared' for all languages and also synchronized between the servers. The image sizes are also reduced without a visible loss of quality.
Interesting, right? Contact me and I will gladly tell you more about it.
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Ajaxlife is the online platform of SV Ajax, with over 90,000 members one of the biggest supporters associations in Europe. The website is on the one hand a portal for contact with members about club affairs, such as becoming a member, changing data or booking bus tickets for away games.
Main reason that Ajax fans visit the site is the large offer (certainly around matches) of updates with news, blogs and photo reports, opinion pieces and match analyzes with statistics posted by SV Ajax's own editors.
On math days there are also polls and man-of-the-match elections that promote interaction with the public.
Also because ajaxlife.nl is the data source for the mobile apps of SV Ajax, this website has proved to be a challenge in terms of optimization in the field of hardware and software. From configuration of the web server and caching to minimizing database requests and html output, ajaxlife.nl had it all.
Unfortunately, after almost 10 years, a nice collaboration has come to an end. My last project for Ajaxlife (in the autumn of 2018) was to make the more than 20,000 updates (including media files) available with a webservice for the data migration to the developers of the new website .
Erol Erdogan of Ajaxlife - Nick Rockx was for us the man to trust on at Mangrove. Whether it concerned fixing bugs or problems, creating APIs with our other partners or answers to our online questions; Nick arranged it quickly and well. His technical know-how and knowledge of our online activities were really important to us. He was an indispensable part of our online success in recent years.
Interesting, right? Contact me and I will gladly tell you more about it.
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