Steven Kennis

Artoos 2025

Artoos is a leading printing and communication company in Belgium, specializing in high-quality print and digital media solutions. The project involved modernizing their digital asset management system and creating a seamless workflow between print and digital platforms.

We modernized a legacy .NET Framework web tool used for generating price catalogs for BMW and Mini. Migrated the solution to a modern cloud-based architecture, aligning it with current standards and technologies for improved maintainability, performance and security.

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Nexuzhealth Pro 2024 – 2025

Nexuzhealth, a joint venture between Cegeka and UZ Leuven, develops an Electronic Patient File for home nurses and general practitioners. They are the Flemish market leader.

New people (including me) were brought in to analyse the problems, and rewrite the whole invoicing module from scratch. We pulled the module out of the monolith, and started building a new solution using DDD, CQRS and keeping the SOLID principles in mind. This time with good test coverage, having all different sorts of tests.

In the end we had a system that scored a lot better in observability, was more performant, and no more confusions because of ubiquitous language.

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Samenferm Kinderopvang 2021 – 2023

Samenferm Kinderopvang is an organization that offers childcare in the whole of Flanders. They focus on children from 0 to 12 years old and provide various childcare options like childminders (onthaalouders), Out-of-school care and daycare centers.

They have an old desktop app, which they used for years, to do their planning of children and employees, generate invoices, calculate wages. This app had its limitations: it was slow, and you could only access it via Citrix. Not ideal for a childminder with a crying baby in her arms.

So what they needed was a web app that was easy to use, and easy accessible. We build a new front-end in Angular for the Ferm administration, an easy to use mobile progressive app for the childminders, and a new calendar for parents, to request out-of-school care. In the back-end we had several .NET microservices handle it all. Writing good tests was really important, as it was the cornerstone to ensure good quality.

The application now offers a better user experience, being faster, easier to use, and smarter.

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C-Export 2021

Goal was to create an application that can export and convert big loads of data from a medical electronic patient record. A real-time metrics dashboard was made with Blazor and MudBlazor, so the user can see exactly what is going on. For the actual export process, a dotnet package called TPL Dataflow was used. This way we could run several steps in parallel to make exporting and converting documents to other formats as efficient as possible.

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C-Meal Plus 2019 – 2020

C-MEAL is an internally developed product by Cegeka, currently part of Nexuzhealth. It is a web tool for patient-oriented meal selection and efficient meal distribution in healthcare institutions.

The old application was generated with a code generation tool, the license of which was about to expire. We developed a calendar application with React, where various meal plans could be created. If necessary, this could be linked to patient information in the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) from different providers (e.g., KWS, Nexuzhealth, etc.).

There was also a mobile web interface, allowing patients to select their meal for the following day from their hospital bed using their own phone or tablet. Additionally, there was a data export function for the hospital kitchen, enabling them to prepare the meals.

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Q8 2018 – 2019

Q8 is part of the national oil company of Kuwait, and one of the world's largest oil companies. They had several existing .NET applications that needed support. Apart from the need of new features, they also had performance problems which needed to be addressed.

My main focus was the PMT (Price Management Tool). Which in short, is a tool keeping track of contracts. Written in .NET, with a Razor MVC front-end. When I got to the project, we had some issues with performance. As every click on a button did several operations on a whole lot of data, it was very slow, and not usable at all.

The solution was a combination of several things, most importantly:

• More efficient Entity Framework use
• Handle some operations asynchronous with Hangfire

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OZ 2017

OZ was an independent health insurance fund (now part of Helan). They had the need for a web client portal, on which the client could check their services, invoices and communications.

For most of this data they relied on a very slow external api, not capable of handling the load generated by a client portal. We build a beautiful UI in Angular. The API was written in .NET, hosted on Azure, capable to scale up automatically when needed. It cached most of the aggregated data from the external api.

After a year of development, we went live. The client then had a way to check everything OZ related online, instead of calling the help desk, or going to an OZ location.

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Kazou 2016

Kazou, a part of CM, organizes holiday camps for children and teenagers. The old site experienced frequent database locks and downtimes, along with lost bookings, due to the simultaneous release of holiday sales to all parents. Resulting in upset parents and children.

We built a scalable .NET booking platform capable of handling those peak loads. The site open to the parents reads data from a Redis cache, constantly held up to date by the back-end, instead of directly going to the database. Bookings are being processed on the booking queue, instead of directly by the back-end. Accurate and real-time data is essential to avoid overbooking during peak holiday periods.

Focused on performance, as the datasets were quite large.

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Belron/Carglass 2015

Belron is the global leader in vehicle glass repair and replacement company, mostly known by one of its brands Carglass. To handle the variability between car models, Carglass maintains a detailed database of vehicle glass installation guides, containing step by step instructions, pictures and video's.

We did support on the web version, a lot of new features were still needed. And we build a new mobile version, so technicians could view their instructions on their phone or tablet.

The same time we also supported a scheduler for technicians on the road, so they always get to their next location in time. This was a real-time web calendar, that was used in several Scandinavian countries. Using SignalR, every change was immediately visible to everybody having the same screen open.

The moment we got the project, performance was so bad it was practically unusable, and since there were no tests, it was difficult to maintain in the beginning. Tests were written, code and queries were optimized, and eventually we could roll this project out in more countries.

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Engie/Electrabel 2008 – 2014

Electrabel is a major energy company. They are a significant player in the Belgian electricity and gas market.

I was part of the Commodity Trading team, responsible for buying and selling electricity and gas on the international markets. Since every second counts, it is crucial a trader gets correct real-time price information on their screen. For this, they had GlobalVision, a platform that could show data in real-time, indicating price drops in a specific color for example. But it needs to be fed data, this is where we came in to the picture.

We made services, polling for prices in the international markets, pushing the data to GlobalVision. This needed to be done in a smart and efficient way, since the platform could not handle pushing every price pulled, so only changes could be pushed, and in batches. For this we set up a RabbitMQ, to keep track price changes. And since we needed to poll for data, we should also keep rate limits in mind.

Project was delivered, but since some markets needed to be web scraped to get the right data, constant maintenance was needed.

Also, using OutSystems low-code, we created an internal ticketing tool that streamlines support requests from traders to various teams, including our own.

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Fedex 2007 – 2008

FedEx Corporation is a global logistics company. Contributed to the maintenance of 'EMEA Imaging Ship to Collect' (EISTC), a system designed to digitally archive paper documents and link them to specific shipments. This was aimed at ensuring faster availability for customs inquiries, thereby minimizing delays.

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ABC-Groep 2005 – 2007

Contributed to multiple custom software projects in the early stages of my career, supporting clients including Vrt,Geonius, VCOB, and Sultan Reizen.

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