❯ stephanzych work --list

Selected work.

A few engagements, described honestly. Where exact figures are confidential, the outcome is qualitative, but real. No invented metrics, and every client named is work I actually built.

Discuss a project

case-studies

The work, in detail.

Cherry Pulp

0 → exit

From zero to acquisition

Context: A digital studio started from nothing, needing an engineering team, a stack, and a delivery capability built from scratch.
Challenge: Stand up the technical side of a new studio and grow it (people, practice, and platform) to the point where it could be acquired.
Role: Co-founder & CTO.
Work: Built the engineering team and the stack, set the delivery process, and led technical direction across client work for over a decade.
Outcome: A studio that grew from zero to a successful acquisition in 2023, with the transition completing in 2024 and an engineering capability that outlasted any single project.

Technical leadership & delivery Team enablement Product engineering TypeScript PHP DevOps CI/CD

CBTW

Modernisation in progress

Modernising how a team builds and ships

Context: The technical team that came out of the Cherry Pulp integration: four to five engineers delivering concurrent client projects, with deployment still done by hand and over FTP, hosted on Laravel Forge.
Challenge: Move a whole team onto a modern, repeatable delivery pipeline without pausing client work. The foundations have to change underneath live projects, so nothing can stall while they do.
Role: Lead Developer, engaged through STEPHANZYCH. Hands-on in a team of four to five engineers, owning architecture and technical standards across concurrent projects.
Work: Introduced a shared Docker local development environment (Traefik, PHP, MariaDB, phpMyAdmin) as the common baseline across projects. Building GitLab CI pipelines and secured containerised deployment on AWS Lightsail to replace manual and FTP-based deployment and move off Laravel Forge, with observability through Grafana, Prometheus and Loki.
Outcome: In progress. The shared local environment is in place, and the pipeline is rolling out project by project alongside ongoing client delivery: legacy workflows and the new one currently run side by side.

Technical leadership & delivery Architecture & platform evolution Docker GitLab CI AWS Lightsail Grafana / Prometheus / Loki

eFarmz

Held under COVID peaks

Re-platforming a food business under COVID load

Context: eFarmz delivers organic food boxes and groceries. Their PrestaShop store had stopped keeping up. Then COVID hit and order volumes went vertical.
Challenge: Migrate off the legacy platform without losing an order: keep stock and orders synced with operations in real time, survive sudden traffic surges, and let customers compose their own boxes through a purchase path that stayed simple under all of it.
Role: Frontend, UI/UX and the custom e-shop, at Cherry Pulp.
Work: Rebuilt the storefront from PrestaShop onto a custom platform: a complete purchase path around customer-composed boxes, real-time ERP integration so stock and orders stayed in sync, and infrastructure tuned to absorb spikes.
Outcome: The new platform carried eFarmz through the unprecedented order peaks of the COVID crisis with real-time ERP sync intact. Work that contributed to an E-commerce of the Year award and recognition at the BeCommerce and Feweb awards.

Architecture & platform evolution Product engineering PHP Custom e-commerce ERP integration Frontend architecture

MyTribuNews

Scaled with the traffic

Scaling an automated magazine platform

Context: MyTribuNews turns user-uploaded photos and text into automatically generated magazines. It had just been named Startup of the Year, so the traffic was real.
Challenge: Handle large batch uploads, concurrent users, and CPU-heavy magazine generation for thousands of simultaneous people, without generation times ballooning or the platform going dark under peak load.
Role: Frontend: the Vue.js compositor and front-of-house architecture, at Cherry Pulp.
Work: Built the in-browser magazine compositor in Vue.js (mobile-first, resilient to whole-album uploads) coupled to a horizontally scalable backend: microservices splitting generation from the app, a Redis-backed task queue, and load-balanced worker servers.
Outcome: Magazines kept generating within hours as usage grew exponentially, and the platform held performance and availability through its peaks.

Architecture & platform evolution Product engineering Vue.js Microservices Redis Load balancing

Climespace

Landmark-scale clients

Making district-cooling data legible

Context: Climespace runs Europe's largest district-cooling network, serving landmark Paris buildings. Mon Climespace lets those owners manage cooling budgets, consumption, and equipment.
Challenge: Cooling at this scale is data-heavy and physical. Owners, not technicians, needed to understand budgets and consumption, but also their actual installations: which equipment is where, how it connects, how it performs.
Role: Full frontend and part of the backend, at Cherry Pulp.
Work: Built the client platform for tracking budgets and consumption across buildings, plus a schematic / graph view that renders hierarchical cooling installations as a legible visual, turning structured equipment data into something an owner can reason about at a glance.
Outcome: Building owners got a single place to manage cooling budgets, consumption, and equipment, with their installations rendered as a clear schematic rather than a spreadsheet.

Product engineering Architecture & platform evolution Frontend architecture Data visualisation Backend

20km de Bruxelles

Tens of thousands of runners

The city's race, from sign-up to finish

Context: The 20km de Bruxelles is one of Belgium's biggest mass-participation races: tens of thousands of runners looping through the city every May. It needed a website that served all of them.
Challenge: A race site runs in two modes: an evergreen information hub most of the year, then a high-traffic registration-and-results engine on race day, when the whole city checks at once. All in three languages (FR/NL/EN), for an audience from elite athletes to first-timers.
Role: Frontend and build, at Cherry Pulp.
Work: Built the trilingual participant-facing site: the course, rules and history, an online registration flow, practical information (training, mobility, accessibility), and a results section with a race-day countdown.
Outcome: A trilingual home that carried runners from sign-up to finish line (registration, practical info, and results in one place) for one of Belgium's largest races.

Product engineering WordPress Frontend Trilingual (FR/NL/EN)

Daoust

Four brands, one platform

Four brand sites on one shared theme

Context: Daoust is a Belgian HR and employment group: staffing, titres-services household help, and career management. Its presence spans four sites (daoust.be, daconnect.be, dahome.be and dajobs.be) that needed to look and feel like one family.
Challenge: Four brands, four audiences, one identity. Each site has its own content, but they had to share a consistent design rather than be maintained as four disconnected codebases, with data flowing between them and a backend platform.
Role: The shared WordPress theme and the API integration layer, at Cherry Pulp. Not the Laravel application or the API itself.
Work: Built the single WordPress theme behind all four sites, flexible enough to express each brand on its own terms yet structured so changes don't cascade unpredictably across the others, and implemented the integrations wiring those sites into the distributed API, keeping frontend templates stable as data shapes and sources changed behind them.
Outcome: Four Daoust brands now share one design and one platform, consistent to visitors and far lighter to maintain than four separate sites.

Architecture & platform evolution Product engineering WordPress Shared multi-site theme API integration

Boxify

Full SaaS frontend

Self-storage with a customer portal

Context: Boxify is a storage service with a simple promise: you box it, we store it. It needed a website and app where customers manage the goods they have put into storage, backed by an admin interface and an API.
Challenge: Storage is a service people want to forget about, which means the software has to be effortless. Customers needed to size what they wanted to store, then see and manage their items without thinking, while the team needed real tools to administer it all behind the scenes.
Role: The whole SaaS frontend, UI and UX, at Cherry Pulp.
Work: Built the customer-facing platform: a storage calculator that sizes the space, and the price, a customer actually needs before committing, and an intuitive portal and app for managing stored goods, turning a logistical workflow of items in, items out and invoicing into something customers could navigate without thinking about it.
Outcome: Boxify customers got a portal they can size, fill and manage their storage from, and the team got the admin tooling and API to run the service behind it.

Product engineering Frontend architecture SaaS portal UI/UX

Abattoir

One codebase, two platforms

A mobile app for a historic market site

Context: Abattoir runs the historic market site in Anderlecht, Brussels: home to the Foodmet food hall, the Brocantemet flea market, a working meat-and-fish wholesale market, and an ongoing urban redevelopment.
Challenge: A century-old site with many moving parts (markets, wholesalers, news, events, redevelopment) needed a mobile presence that put all of it in visitors' pockets, on both iOS and Android, without maintaining two separate native builds.
Role: The full build, at Cherry Pulp: the Ionic React app and the Laravel API behind it, end to end.
Work: Built the cross-platform app in Ionic React, one codebase shipping to iOS and Android, on an API-first Laravel backend serving as a genuine single source of truth, so the mobile layer never had to decide which platform's data was authoritative.
Outcome: Abattoir got one cross-platform app on a single codebase and API, rather than two native builds to keep in sync.

Product engineering Architecture & platform evolution Ionic React Laravel iOS & Android API

timeline

Where the time has gone.

CBTW 2023 — now Lead Developer

Leading full-stack delivery and technical direction on enterprise platforms, engaged through STEPHANZYCH.

Cherry Pulp 2013 — 2024 Co-founder & CTO

Built the studio and its engineering team from zero to acquisition.

TBWA · Agency.com 2009 — 2013 Rich-media Developer

Interactive and campaign work for international brands.

Bring me a harder one