Me

I’m just an average, everyday software developer with too many things on his mind.
This blog is an attempt to get some of those things out of my mind, and onto a shareable medium.

Oh, and I love Emacs, but you’ll figure that out as you read through my posts.

I am currently employed at TomTom as a Senior Software engineer, a great environment where I’ve had many opportunities to grow and learn over the years.

My Experience

TomTom (2018 - present)

I started working as a fresh-out-of-school Software Engineer for TomTom in the autumn of 2018.

Throughout the years I have grown from a green, young developer, into a fully-fledged software engineer, embracing all of the aspects that come with developing enterprise, production-ready software for a number of projects:

• I have gathered experience and expertise in Java and its JVM siblings, along with a slew of high quality, well-known frameworks and libraries such as Spring (Boot), Hibernate, RxJava, etc. Some Python sprinkled on the side was never an exception either.
  

• I’ve refined my operational and infrastructure skills by setting up, deploying and managing everything from a small AWS Lambda, to a large-scale system of microservices on both self-managed and cloud-managed Kubernetes services.
  

• Software and tools such as Haschicorp’s Terraform and Vault, Grafana, Prometheus, but also many of the managed services from cloud providers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are no strangers to me.
  

• At different points throughout my career, I have also come in contact with data-intensive applications, requiring me to build knowledge of Data Pipeline solutions like Apache’s Airflow, as well as the wonderful world of Spark and its hosted runtime environments such as Databricks.
  

But most of all, I have learned what it means to be a team player. Great mentorship and amazing colleagues have elevated me to where I am today, and through the years I have had the honor to act as the Technical Lead of several amazing teams, applying the knowledge and experience they have thrust upon me.

I still learn everyday, if not more than when I was new; and I want to keep on learning.

My Projects

I am not extremely active in the Open Source community, for a lack of time, motivation and energy.

This blog is an attempt to give back bits and pieces of knowledge that I have gathered over many years, while also motivating myself to do more in this space.

Some minor things I have(n’t) been working on are:

• newsa.gent – the source of this blog. Provides a sneak peek into draft/unpublished content, without the need for a Patreon subscription!
  
• cue-mode.el – a minimal Emacs major mode for the CUE configuration language
  
• emacs.d – my personal Emacs configuration. Caution: very disorganized and prone to mishaps!
  

Those, and any other (un)finished projects you can find over at my GitHub profile.