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Michael Hendrickx

Belgian, 28, living in Dubai, founded www.places.ae

Headline: Entrepreneur
Work status: Employed Full-Time
Website: http://www.places.ae
Industries: Information Technology, Internet
Skills: AJAX, Business, C/C++, Database Administration, Databases, Design, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, Flash, French, German, HTML / CSS, Human-Computer Interaction, Javascript, Languages, Languages and Platforms, Leadership, MacOS applications, Management, Perl, PHP, Rails, Software Engineering, SQL, System Administration, Unix, Web design, Web Development, Windows, Windows applications, Writing
Location: Dubai, UAE
Visas: Have Belgian passport, should be ok for most countries.
Interested in: Brainstorming, Finding business partners, Finding engineers, Finding team mates, Helping friends, Learning about entrepreneurship, Meeting new people, Professional opportunities, Promoting my startups, Recruiting for my startup, Starting a company

FEATURED STARTUP

Places.ae

Places.ae Places.ae

Places.ae is a location based search engine in the United Arab Emirates, focused on Dubai. It lets you find many businesses and places of interest in the UAE, using the web or mobile clients.

  • Startup type: Company
  • Status: Active
  • Stage: Beta

WORK EXPERIENCE

Employer: Nakheel, Dubai, UAE
Position: Application Team Lead
Time period: March 2007 - Present
Description: Nakheel is the world’s largest privately owned real estate company which is known
for its land mark project such as the Palm Islands and The World. My roles and
responsibilities in Nakheel were:
- Overseeing of application development and support teams, including web
applications, door access control, enterprise project management, finance
tracking, document management.
- Implementation and tweaking of internal datacenter monitoring tools, based
on Zenoss and Cacti.
- Involved in implementation of Oracle BI
- Implementation of VMWare ESX to provide virtualization for server farm,
enable near-instant server implementation and high availability. Created new
hosting environments from scratch (IIS / MsSQL and PHP / MySQL).
- Administer all servers in Nakheel, these include Windows 2003, Linux and
HPUX.
- Helped building external hosting infrastructure in data centers in the US,
performed troubleshooting on our external websites.
- Perform periodic security audits on internal and external websites, to find
vulnerabilities such as cross site scripting and sql injection.
- Being part of a team to implement change control to achieve ITIL
certification.

Employer: www.places.ae
Position: Work experience
Description: I’ve built www.places.ae, which is the location-based search engine for Dubai and
the rest of the UAE. This was built on Ruby on Rails, having a MySQL database.
I’ve architected and developed both the front end and the backend code, and
performed optimizations on the ruby code, the javascript and HTML code and the
SQL tables.
After a few months being operational, I’ve developed the mobile website, with
support for BlackBerry GPS devices. Herewith, a user can find the “closest
starbucks” for example.
After that, I programmed a Windows Mobile 5.0+ thick client to achieve the same
through cell tower positioning.

Employer: DubaiWorld, Dubai, UAE
Position: Information Architect
Time period: April 2006 - February 2007
Description: DubaiWorld is the holding company that has subsidiaries such as DPWorld, JAFZA,
Nakheel, DMCC, One & Only, Limitless and others. My role in DubaiWorld as an
architect included:
- Architecting new systems to support several business units.
- Re-engineering existing systems and processes to streamline technologies,
frameworks and hardware used in the group.
- Assisted in drafting information security policies
- Architected Blackberry roll-out in the group.
- Drafted and implemented mobile policies and guidelines
- Drafted and implemented wireless policies and guildelines
- Assessed security on new rolled out applications.

Employer: Scanit, Brussels, Belgium / Dubai, UAE
Position: Sr Security Engineer
Time period: January 2002 - April 2006
Description: Scanit is a well known IT security assessment company in Belgium, and its Dubai
office is the regional leader in IT security auditing in the Middle East. My role in
Scanit included:
- Performing technical intensive security assessment on customer’s systems in
northern America, Europe and the Middle East.
- Leading a team of security engineers during onsite and offsite projects
- Write in-house scripts and programs to ease security assessments.
- Co-developed the new ethical hacking course
- Developed Advanced hacking - exploit writing course
- Outsourced to a telecom operator in Qatar for 9 months to fix their internal
systems, assess their security and re-engineer their security policies and
strategy.
Prior to my professional career I did summer jobs in Ubizen (acquired by Verizon)
and had an after-school job being a technical helpdesk agent in UUNet.

INFORMATION

Hobbies: Photography
Awards: CISSP, ITILv3

Michael's Startups (1)

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  • Places.ae

    Places.ae is a location based search engine in the United Arab Emirates, focused on Dubai. It lets you find many businesses and places of interest in the UAE, using the web or mobile clients.

Michael is Following (14)

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  • Apen.be

    Buidling local web media properties.

  • eMapia

    eMapia is a location based marketplace that is designed to make shopping an easy experience

  • wasfati

    Arab food portal

  • KuruCube

    Kuru is back to cube again! Think personal, think space, think attitude, Think inside the Box.

Michael's Contacts (4)

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  • john ruddle

    Spent the last fifteen years in the military as a cryogenic operator and maintenance supervisor. Looking for investors and interesting parties to collaborate on a new up and coming web site that could change the way we do things today as we know it.

  • Gaith Saqr

    founder and editor

  • Michael Smith

    Software Developer specialized in web applications using Ruby on Rails, Django, Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit

  • Dan Stuart

    Canadian, living in Dubai, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Bayt.com