About

Bram.us is the technical/geeky weblog of Bram Van Damme (nicknamed Bramus!), a 27 year old geezer raised in Deinze and living in Gent Deinze with his girlfriend and son Finn, Belgium.

Bramus! – who likes to speak in the third-person every now and then – is intrigued by webdevelopment and all its surrounding technologies. Over time (6 years in the field of which 5 in the professional world) he has developed a profound knowledge of XHTML 1.x Strict, CSS 2.1, Unobtrusive JavaScript (Object Literal Notation, JSON, etc.), PHP (OOP!), Lasso, MySQL, Some MS SQL, ActionScript, … amongst many other geeky things.

Da hidden pic (with my long hair)!

Daily readings, combined with fast learning skills and a healthy interest in the full spectrum of webdevelopment, keep his knowledge up to date and give him a clear insight in the most recent technologies such as AJAX and other Web 2.0 goodies. By now these “technologies” have become daily usage, making its usage more perfect day by day (complex javascripts of 2000+ lines of code aren’t unknown to Bramus!).

Above that he has had a decent Java and C# experience to complete it all. Yes that’s correct, he’s more of a coder than a graphics dude (keep that in mind whilst wandering around on Bram.us), although he has an eye for aesthetics and can perfectly find his way around in Photoshop and even knock up some basic designs.

In 2005 he graduated with honors as a “Professional Bachelor ICT” at “de Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven” (kahosl.be) and started working as a xhtml&css&js&php&mysql-guru (the formal name is “New Media Developer (NMD)“) over at wax.be. Next to the NMD stuff, Bramus! administered 4 production servers (4 x Windows2003+IIS+MySQL+DNS+Email, 2 x Plesk, 1 x Ensim, 1 x without Admin Panel) next to 3 internal servers (1 x Windows2003+IIS+MySQL+AD+File Server // 1 x Windows2003+ISA Server // 1 x Windows2003+Exchange Server+AD). Above that he was the lead programmer at Wax, resulting in the fact that he did QC on all produced code.

In February 2007 Bramus! took steps into the entrepreneurship and started his own company named 3RDS (short for Third Degree Sideburns). Since then he’s been doing some freelance jobs next to his main job

In September 2007, Bramus! switched jobs and moved over to Netlash, to fulfill the function of slicer / front-end developer / back-end developer (xhtml&css/js/php&mysql)

After a short pit-stop as a developer at Netlog in the summer of 2008, Bramus! went back to where he came from: “de Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven”.

This time however he didn’t arrive there as a student but as a teacher, lecturing the courses Web Technology 1 (XHTML, CSS & JS), Web Technology 2 & 3 (PHP), Databases (MySQL) and Operating Systems 1 (Windows). Next to that he’s also co-administering a few studentservers and maintaining the ikdoeict.be website.

Bramus! his C.V. (currently still in Dutch) can be read by clicking the item “Curriculum Vitae” from the left menu. An online portfolio (of the non-3RDS projects) hasn’t landed yet, but he’s sure you’ll find some interesting reading here on Bram.us.

Be sure to check the Portfolio and Webdevelopment categories here on bram.us to see some of the more recent projects/webthoughts

A total differenct aspect of Bramus! is his passion for Scouting. Having been a member of Scouting Deinze since the age of 7, he has been a leader for 6 years and even became main leader (together with his collegues Cédric & Emilie) from early 2006 up to Q3 2007. His totem is “Inventive Self-Willed Gibbon“, as explained right here, which he likes a lot, as it totally fits his personality!

Nowadays Bramus! is active in other ways in Scouting Deinze: maintaining the tranceFUSION Website, helping out to maintain the domain and buildings, organizing some small parties, etc.

On a sidenote, Bramus! his personal blog – in addition to this one and written in Flemish/Dutch – can be found over at lnieuwingent.be.