One person, and the people I trust.
FLATMAP is me, Yacine Serroukh, working from Brussels. It’s small on purpose, and that has consequences for you worth spelling out.
Fifteen years of things that weren’t allowed to break.
I’ve been building software since 2011. Most of that time went into apps a lot of people depend on every day: the Easy Banking app at BNP Paribas Fortis, ING’s app across Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, Mastercard’s mobile payment system, and more recently a secure messaging app for the Belgian public sector.
Working at that scale teaches you one habit above all: assume it will break, and build so it doesn’t. Test everything. Never publish on a Friday afternoon and hope. The habit doesn’t switch off when a project gets smaller, either. On a small project it costs almost nothing to keep, and it’s the difference between a website that still works in three years and one that stopped one day without anyone noticing.
What the apps didn’t take, teaching did: coaching teams, pairing daily, getting specialists to share what they knew. It’s why I’d rather explain what I’m doing than be mysterious about it, and why you won’t get jargon from me unless you ask.
FLATMAP exists because the slow parts of this job can now be automated. Work that used to need a team and a matching budget can be done well by one person in a few weeks. So I take on the projects that used to fall through the gap.
- Brussels, Belgium
- 2011
- French (native) · English (fluent) · Dutch (basic)
- HEB-ESI — Bachelor in Computer Science
- Secure development for mobile
Named, not anonymous.
When a project needs something I don’t do myself (a designer, an illustrator, another developer), it goes to someone I’ve worked with before. You’re told who they are and what they’re doing before they start, and I stay responsible for the result.