Bjarke Pjedsted Full-stack web developer

Overview

Hi, I'm Bjarke.

I'm a full-stack developer with more than 12 years of experience of which about eight as a professional web developer.

I started my career (after my Master) in the gaming industry developing children's games for the GameBoy Advanced. But as the Web grew into the applications domain, so did my interest and I soon found myself developing websites and application full time.

Projects have taken me all over the world; India, Paris, England, Germany, and lately Dubai. I have had a variety of roles including consultant, team lead, UI/UX designer, and partial product owner and scrum master.

I have a professional approach to software engineering and believe in test driven development based on a healthy discipline — when it suits the project.

About me

I'm 41, Danish and fluent in English.

My degree from Aalborg University started me on a path of exciting possibilities which lead me through a great variety of jobs from Copenhagen to Dubai. I enjoy seeing code evolve into pixels on the screen and, maybe not surprising, one of my main hobbies is photography.

I'm looking to evolve my skills and keep at the front of the Web with the tools being what they are; tools to achieve the goal.

When not working you can find me on the top of a mountain — taking pictures — or keeping active, be it cross-fit, yoga, or running an obstacle course.

Skills

JavaScript

JavaScript have been my main programming language for the last six years or so. It has evolved slowly into a more modern language with ES6 and helpers like async/await.

Working with JS is of cause as much about the knowledge of libraries and technologies used, for example jQuery, eslint, v8, node.js, yarn/npm, etc.

AngularJS

I've worked with AngularJs for about four years building enterprise applications. The structured nature of Angular makes it great for large projects.

The next step is to get knowledge about migration and upgrade to Angular

Meteor

Meteor is a framework to help build web single page web applications. It uses JavaScript on the server and client side making it easier to reuse code, libraries, and tools.

MongoDB

A common choice for JavaScript and node.js development, MongoDB is a powerful and flexible database.

I have gained extensive hands-on experience with data modeling, performance optimizations, as well as everyday usage and production debugging.

Node.js

Writing server-side code in JavaScript might at first seem odd. But what node.js lacks in raw performance and expressive power it gains in simplicity and footprint.

With a fast start-up and low memory usage it makes an excellent platform for scalable microservices.

Material design

While working on a large enterprise application I had the role of UI/UX designer.

As a developer by trait I used the Google Material Design guides rather than trying to do design from the bottom up.

In doing so I believe the user experience was enhanced as well as my skills outside development.

Test Driven Development

Unit tests are useful no matter what language or platform you develop in or if you practice TDD or BDD.

I have experience with Mocha, Jasmine, Testdouble, Chai, Sinon, and RSpec, amongst other.

Other skills

Docker
End-to-end testing:
Chimpy, Selenium, webdriver.io
asp.NET MVC
C# .NET
Agile software development
C/C++
Java
Python
Ruby

Education

2000-2005: Master of Science (MSc) in Computer Science from Aalborg University
1997-2000: Higher Technical Examination Programme

Experience

2014-2018: Senior software developer at Teletronics
2014: Consultant at Appropos ApS
2014: Consultant at Saxo Bank
2014: BPSoft (my one-man company)
2013: Consultant at DFDS
2011-2014: Software developer at Copenhagen Software ApS
2011: Game developer at Pixel Pandemic
2007-2011: Games and senior software developer at NDS Denmark
2005-2007: Game developer at Sirius Games
2005: Det Danske Akademi for Digital, Interaktiv Underholdning (DADIU)

Selected projects

The following is a selection of projects that I have contributed to.

Saxo Bank's tradingfloor.com

Tradingfloor.com is a community platform for investors trading forex, CFDs, futures, and stocks. The site consists of expert blogs, squawks (tweets), trader profiles, comments, statistics, etc. In a 12 man team, split in front-end and back-end, I worked on the front-end in asp.NET MVC and JavaScript.

DFDS Seaways booking portal

An online bookings system for the English channel built in asp.NET MVC and JavaScript. Part of the task was to integrate with a legacy Visual Basic backend and match styles of the existing Microsoft Sharepoint marketing site.

stateofgreen.com

State of Green is a platform to share projects in the fields of energy, climate, water, and environment. Developed in-house in Copenhagen Software with a team of 3-4 developers in asp.NET MVC.

Kabel BW - video on demand

For about a year I worked in collaboration with the French department of NDS on a Video on Demand service for a German customer. My job was to be architect, team lead and handle the communication with the French team. This involved multiple trips to Paris, coordination meetings, and on-location debugging. Finally in June 2010 I traveled to India for two weeks for a handover to the Indian department. I was promoted to Senior Software developer on this project.

STB game development

During my time in NDS I had the opportunity to develop several games for set top boxes (STB). The games are written in C++ and interleaved into the satellite stream that provides TV. Below are some of the titles I participated in developing.

Babar to the Rescue

Babar is a children's game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance written in C++. As my first job as game programmer I gained experience in coding logic for each level as well as helping where help was needed — be it designing levels or fixing animations.