One person, and the people he trusts.
FLATMAP is me — Yacine Serroukh — working from Brussels. It is deliberately small, and it is worth being straight about what that means for you.
Fifteen years of things that were not allowed to break.
I have been building software since 2013. Most of that 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 does not. Test everything. Never publish on a Friday afternoon and hope. That habit does not switch off when a project gets smaller — on a smaller project it costs almost nothing to have, and it is the difference between a website that still works in three years and one that quietly stopped.
The other half of those years went into teaching. Coaching teams, pairing daily, getting specialists to share what they knew instead of sitting on it. That is why I would rather explain what I am doing than be mysterious about it, and why you will not get jargon from me unless you ask for it.
FLATMAP is what happens now that the slow parts of this job can be automated. Work that used to need a team and a budget to match can be done properly by one person in a few weeks. So I take on the projects that used to fall through the gap.
- Brussels, Belgium
- 2013
- 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 do not do myself — a designer, an illustrator, another developer — it goes to someone I have worked with before, not to whoever is cheapest on a marketplace. You are told who they are and what they are doing before they start, and I stay responsible for the result.