Stef Thoen

Chessout is a startup with an app for finding chess players near you to play a game against. Since September 2026 I've been working on the web app as a full-stack engineer, in React and TypeScript.

A multi-tenant platform in Laravel, with Livewire and Filament. I can't name the client yet. In 2026 I added features with a lot of business rules, including features that use AI. I built much of it with AI agents, with tests (Pest) and static analysis (Larastan) as a safety net.

Nerds is a helpdesk for all your digital devices and services, also as a white-label service for other companies. As lead full-stack engineer I led the rebuild of their legacy PHP platform in Next.js, React and Tailwind. I built the front-end: a fast, keyboard-first interface on top of one API for several ticketing systems. I also introduced Scrum, mentored a junior developer and delivered a pilot for investors.

Voys provides business telephony. As lead full-stack engineer I merged their WordPress sites into one multisite on Sage and Bedrock and rewrote the sales funnel from jQuery to Svelte and TypeScript. I also introduced Tailwind, a design system in Storybook, feature flags, code reviews and a CI/CD pipeline with GitLab CI.

I made the Nexus Institute website responsive, so it scales with different screen sizes. The old website used a bespoke CMS. To loud cheers from the Nexus editors I moved it to WordPress. A new WooCommerce store lets customers order the latest Nexus magazine with great ease. Later I rebuilt the site with a new design, added subscriptions and memberships, and set up CI/CD to staging and production.

Lefebvre Sdu is a publisher of legal and tax information for professionals. As lead front-end engineer I led a Scrum team that rebuilt an Angular app in TypeScript and React on Next.js, on top of the existing design system in Storybook.

De Speld is the largest satirical website in the Netherlands, at the time with more than 1.5 million visitors a month. I did a big refactor and modernised the codebase, which raised the Google PageSpeed score by 50 points. I also developed new features and connected the website to a new advertising partner. Finally we introduced the “Vage Kennis” subscription, which lets visitors become a member and see an ad-free version of the website.

Quai des Notaires is a French startup in the notary market. I was project lead of a team that converted a Symfony 3 web application with Twig templates into a Symfony 4 GraphQL API with a React front-end.

Hogeschool Utrecht asked me to develop a tool for selecting strategies for behaviour change. Based on the design by Panton I built a responsive React progressive web app.