About
I am Bartel. I have been building for the web for over fifteen years, most of it in Laravel, most of it for businesses whose software has to be right rather than merely impressive.
I work as a freelance Laravel developer from Roeselare, in West Flanders, for clients across Belgium and beyond. The work I like is the work with a hard edge to it — a stock level that has to be explainable, an invoice that a government rule set will either accept or refuse, money moving between parties who each have a claim on it. Those problems have a correct answer, and finding it is more satisfying than another dashboard.
Rascals stays a one-person studio deliberately. It means I can only take a few projects at a time, and it means the person you explained your business to is the person writing the code. Nothing is relayed, nothing is handed to whoever was free that week, and there is no layer of account management billing you for the privilege.
It also means I say no to things. If your problem is better solved by software that already exists, or by a specialist I am not, I will point you at it. A project I should not have taken costs you far more than the one I turned down.
Selected work
A modular platform that manages anything.
The application is built around a single core, with packages carrying everything around it. Adding something for the next customer, or taking it away, stays easy.
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Ticketing that is honest about the money.
A multi-organiser ticket platform where the fee is stated, the currency belongs to the event, and the receipt never changes after the fact.
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The clerk: writes the invoice, keeps the record, sends it out.
Belgian B2B invoicing over the Peppol network, checked against the official rules before anything leaves the building.
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A season that runs whether you watch it or not.
A cyclocross manager: you run a team, the races run themselves on a Sunday, and a race nobody watched was raced as fully as one they did.
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Reads the post, and says what every message is.
Incoming mail read over IMAP, grouped into conversations and labelled for what it is — a tender, a request for a price, a customer with a problem — without a copy of it leaving the building.
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From clicked options to a plan somebody can run.
An offer builder that turns chosen options into priced phases, and an accepted offer into a project with sprints, steps and a clock on each of them.
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Nine energy and telecom providers, one form.
A contract platform for a Belgian broker: one intake, nine providers' real PDF forms filled, signed with eID and pushed into the CRM.
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Tell me what it is in a few lines. You get a real answer from me — whether I am the right fit, roughly what it would take, and what I would do first. No obligation and no sales sequence.
Taking on new work