Technical leadership
A freelance tech lead who sits with the team, sets the technical direction, reviews the code and keeps product and engineering talking. Experience leading teams of three to eight, local and nearshore.
Development & Technical Leadership
A steady hand for critical platforms.
I’m Tom Schuermans, a freelance developer and technical lead from Belgium. Through Tool Shed, I build and modernise the platforms behind hosting, SaaS and e-commerce companies, and lead the teams that run them.
Services
What you can hand over.
Most work comes in one of four shapes. Often it is a mix: a platform that needs new features, a team that needs direction and a codebase that needs to be trusted again.
Legacy modernisation
Moving an ageing monolith to a maintainable stack while it keeps earning money. Strangler pattern migrations, framework upgrades and test coverage that makes deploying boring again.
Backend & API development
Greenfield APIs and new features for existing products. Specialised in the unglamorous core of a business: billing, renewals, payments, order activation and Peppol e-invoicing.
Platform & infrastructure
Product ownership for hosting platforms and the infrastructure underneath your application: from load-balanced, auto-scaling AWS setups to lean servers on Hetzner and Forge.
Selected work
Platforms that businesses run on.
Long engagements rather than quick builds. Most clients stay for years, because the work is the product their own customers depend on every day.
Level27
Managed hosting
Platform Manager · 2025 to 2026
Product development for a managed hosting platform.
Started by building the Peppol e-invoicing integration, then moved into the Platform Manager role: designed and shipped new products while keeping the existing services across the platform stable.
Creative Shelter
SaaS for freelancers
Technical Lead · 2022 to 2025
From legacy codebase to near-full test coverage.
Led a team of three engineers building copyright administration software for freelancers. Drove the legacy codebase towards near-full test coverage, which turned releases into frequent, confident deployments.
Bakeronline
E-commerce SaaS
Technical Lead · 2020 to 2022
A monolith rebuilt behind a running webshop platform.
Led a team of six migrating a Fat-Free Framework monolith to a Laravel API with a Vue.js front end using the strangler pattern. Later moved the platform from a single EC2 instance to a load-balanced, auto-scaling AWS setup, cutting costs and handling peak traffic better.
Xenius
Hosting & domains
Developer · 2021 to 2026
A greenfield API that runs the billing.
Built the Laravel API behind the Xenius website and control panel, automating renewal scheduling, invoicing, payments and order activation. Migrated invoicing to Onfact for Peppol compliance.
Nucleus
Hosting & cloud
Technical Lead · 2013 to 2019
Off end-of-life Zend Framework, onto Symfony.
Led the migration from Zend Framework 1.12 to a Symfony API, the backbone of the central information system, the internal support tool and the customer control panel. Managed up to eight developers across Belgium and Romania.
Earlier: Arxus (service architecture for reporting, Microsoft Partner Center integration) and Inventis (web platforms for Belisol and Pukkelpop).
Running a platform like these and short on senior hands?
Discuss your project
Approach
Boring deploys are the goal.
Exciting releases usually mean something went wrong. The work is set up so that shipping on a Friday afternoon is not a story anyone needs to tell.
Migrate while it runs
No big-bang rewrites. New code grows around the old system piece by piece, so the business never waits for a launch date.
Tests before heroics
Pest, PHPStan at the strictest level and automated pipelines. A safety net the whole team can rely on, not one person who knows where the bodies are buried.
Close to the product
Working directly with product owners and the people who use the software. Technical decisions are made with the business case on the table.
Technology
Backend
Go
PHP
Laravel
Data
MySQL
SQLite
Redis
Frontend
TypeScript
React
Tailwind
Quality
Pest
PHPStan
Pint
Delivery
Docker
GitHub Actions
Sentry
Hosting
Nginx
Hetzner
Laravel Forge
About
One person, fifteen years of context.
When you work with Tool Shed, you work with me. No account managers, no hand-offs to juniors.
I have been building software professionally since 2011, from festival websites to the systems that run hosting companies, and since August 2026 Go services for the Flemish Government. Somewhere along the way I became the person teams call when a platform has grown faster than its codebase. I like that part best: untangling things, making them testable and leaving a team that no longer needs me.
Tool Shed is based in Blaasveld, near Mechelen. I work on site or remotely, in Dutch or English.
- Education
- Bachelor in Applied Computer Science, PHL Hasselt, cum laude
Off the keyboard
Horses, their people and the light.
Away from the screen I photograph horses and the people who love them, under the name The Lens of Tom. Same habits as in code: patience, preparation and a lot of attention to detail.
View the portfolio (opens in a new tab)
Contact
Need a steady hand for a critical platform?
Tell me what you are building, or what keeps breaking, and we will see if Tool Shed is a good fit.
hello@toolshed.be
Blaasveld, Belgium