About me
My name is Maxim Van de Wynckel. I am a Belgian software developer living in Brussels. I finished my professional bachelor degree in Applied Informatics with great honors at Erasmushogeschool Brussel. Wanting to expand my knowledge, I did my Master of Science in the Applied Computer Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
After my thesis, I was granted the oppertunity to start as a teaching assistant and Ph.D student at the VUB. Currently I am doing this Ph.D with the subject Hybrid Positioning and Implicit Human-Computer Interaction.
Ever since I was a child, I've been obsessed with 'connecting' things together. Many of my early day projects were things I needed. I would not stop working on these projects until I surpassed existing alternatives. This is a mentality that I've kept for the rest of my academic and professional career.
Bachelor and Master thesis
For me, a thesis was not a project that I 'had' to finish to graduate. It was something I wanted to complete as perfect as possible. My Bachelor final work involved Belgian eID authentication for physical access control to buildings. The task was to allow remote access through the use of an app.
For my Master Thesis I went all-in on an idea I originally had several years ago. I created an indoor navigation system that used inexpensive scanners instead of beacons. This allowed to place the development focus on the modular server and hardware, rather than a company or building specific application that handles all the logic.
Bukkit projects
A very significant portion of my programming career was as a Bukkit plugin developer. Bukkit is a server-side framework for the game Minecraft. Written in Java, it allows for third party plugins to interact with the closed-source game client.
My speciality and interest sparked in trying to figure out ways to utilize everything at the server's disposable to achieve the best goal as possible. I created several popular plugins that were known for their performance and capabilities that were previously deemed impossible.
Unofficial community API's
As a developer, being part of communities is key to learning and finding new inspiration. Throughout my life, I've been apart of many communities that I really enjoyed. Wanting to thank these communities in my own way, I created unofficial API's for these sites, so I could create usability enhancing software.
The very first public site API was for the Dutch community Helpmij.nl. The goal was to create an API that could interact with the site's chat and forum. By allowing this, it was possible to create applications for other platforms.
My huge involvement in the SpigotMC developer community let me to the creation of the SpigotSite API created in Java. This API was similar to the Helpmij.nl site scraper, but with a focus on aiding sellers by providing tools that could allow them to automate certain tasks.