My Work - Proven solutions for technical challenges.

Solcon's existing OAuth server had grown outdated over time. I rewrote the server to align with modern OAuth specification, upgraded the underlying Symfony framework, and implemented their new visual design across the login and authorization flows.

As part of the rewrite I built full two-factor authentication support — SMS, e-mail, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and backup codes — giving users and administrators flexible options for securing their accounts without being locked into a single provider.

Solcon is a Dutch internet service provider whose backend services receive tokens from different authorization servers. I designed and built a reusable Symfony bundle that decorates Symfony's built-in authenticators — OAuth, OpenID Connect, and CAS — to handle all of them through a single, configurable entry point. The bundle peeks inside each incoming token to determine which validation context applies.

The main goal was eliminating per-application authentication code. Instead of every service maintaining its own user classes, factories, and hardcoded role logic, each service now configures its authentication contexts through YAML — matching on token properties, mapping claims to roles, and producing a generic Identity. This allowed us to delete large amounts of legacy Guard-based code from the Symfony 5 era.

Curriculo's direct partners and prospects are among Brazil's largest companies, so the infrastructure needs to function at scale from the start. I built a Dataflow pipeline on Google Cloud that streams incoming resumes through a Go-based PubSub consumer, batches them into CSV files per time window, and executes the batches on a schedule — designed to scale horizontally to handle virtually unlimited volume.

The classified results need to end up in Neo4j for graph-based matching, but the official Dataflow-to-Neo4j template requires Neo4j Enterprise. I built a custom Python importer that reads the same JSON mapping configuration as the official Neo4j template, interprets the mappings, and loads the data into Neo4j Community Edition — making the pipeline production-ready now while preserving a clean upgrade path to the official template later.

Eloo maintained roughly six Symfony applications that had each grown their own copies of models, translations, forms, and authentication logic. The result was significant code drift and inconsistency across the platform. I consolidated this into shared bundles, upgraded the applications to Symfony 6.4, and rebuilt the authentication layer around JWT and a custom SSO authenticator designed so that new providers can be added through configuration alone.

Beyond the architecture work, I introduced Rector and PHP-CS-Fixer to enforce consistent code standards, expanded test coverage with automated quality gates in the CI/CD pipeline, and made targeted improvements to the React frontend alongside the backend modernization.

Curriculo needed a way to accurately classify skills, resumes, and job descriptions against standardized occupational taxonomies — including the EU's ESCO model and the US O*NET model. I built the core classification engine: a Python API that uses vector embeddings and Faiss indexes to match free-text input to the right occupations and skills across these models, along with a GraphQL metadata API that serves exactly the taxonomy data the platform needs.

Around these APIs I built a set of TypeScript cloud functions that act as the serverless glue between the web application and the backend — including a Document AI pipeline for extracting structured data from uploaded documents. Classified relationships are stored in Neo4j, enabling precise, graph-based matching algorithms between candidates and positions.

Donkerzon needed a fast, modern website built on solid foundations. I developed the full application using Symfony for the backend and a TypeScript-driven frontend styled with SASS and Tailwind CSS.

The result is a clean, performant site with a maintainable codebase that is easy to extend and adapt as the business grows.

At DPG Media I worked on the product widget platform serving editorial websites like Ouders van Nu and VT Wonen. Products are aggregated from sources like Bol.com, Amazon, and advertiser feeds — and the system needed to scale to handle large catalogs reliably.

I designed and implemented a queue-based architecture for importing product feeds from Channable asynchronously at scale, built a Postgres full-text search to make the locally stored catalog queryable, and rebuilt the Bol.com adapter on their new Marketing API to resolve persistent rate-limiting issues that had plagued production.

HarlemNext processes approximately 25 million messages per day. I played a key role in replacing and refactoring core applications.

I introduced Protocol Buffers to solve data duplication and structure consistency issues across multiple frontend and backend applications.

InShared is a fully digital insurance provider operating inshared.nl and inshared.de. As part of the Insurance Team, I contributed to the rollout of a renewed in-house framework and the expansion into Germany.

The German insurance market requires different processes and datasets compared to the Netherlands. I designed and implemented SOAP service integrations with multiple data providers to retrieve vehicle information for policy underwriting.

TopGeschenken is a fast-growing scale-up operating Topgeschenken.nl, Toptaarten.nl, and Topbloemen.nl. I worked alongside the ICT architect to analyze processes, identify performance issues, and plan technical improvements.

Drawing on my experience with high-traffic applications, I contributed to the implementation of scalability improvements using Redis, RabbitMQ, and Solr.

At IQ Innovations I worked across a broad range of projects — from building and maintaining websites to implementing payment gateways, CRM systems, and a real-time WebSocket chat server.

Alongside development, I was responsible for server configuration and maintenance, managing both Docker-based and bare-metal Linux environments running Nginx, Redis, and RabbitMQ.

For Thingo I developed multiple serverless web services running on Google Cloud App Engine using both Node.js and PHP (Symfony). A central challenge was unifying authentication across legacy applications and new cloud-native services.

I built an authentication API that bridged legacy credential stores with Google Identity Platform, enabling users to log into new services with their existing accounts.

Huren.nl needed a new platform that brought together rental inventory from multiple external providers into a single marketplace. I built the core system that allows rental companies to manage their products, pricing models, and business rules through a dedicated back-office application.

Consumers can browse and rent items — from cars to trailers — directly on Huren.nl, with availability, pricing, and rental conditions handled transparently. I also developed a geo search backend service for the German sister site mieten.de.

In between professional contracts, I spent time helping a friend develop custom plugins for his Minecraft server. The work involved writing Java plugins for the Bukkit/Spigot API — handling events, managing player data, building custom game mechanics, and dealing with the constraints of a real-time multiplayer environment.

It was a personal project with no commercial pressure, which made it a great opportunity to sharpen my Java skills and experiment with patterns I wouldn't normally reach for in day-to-day backend work.

LeaseWeb is a global hosting provider. I was brought in to develop the OfferDB — the central API that acts as the glue between all departments and drives the product configurator on the website. It powers the drilldown form where customers select server type (baremetal or VPS), CPU, operating system, RAM, and additional services, with each step filtering available options based on the current selection.

Getting this right was critical — OfferDB is what turns LeaseWeb's complex internal hardware catalog into something customers can actually navigate and purchase. Alongside the development work, I was tasked with raising overall team maturity by introducing proper OOP practices, Symfony conventions, and automated testing with Behat.

During the 2015 Beslist.nl Hackathon, I led the technical implementation of a recommendation engine using a Graph Database.

Our team won the hackathon, and the solution was later adopted, driving significant business value.

Beslist.nl is a major comparison site. I worked in the Search Team, responsible for developing and improving search functionalities.

We implemented automatic suggestions, product search, faceted search, and contextual recommendations.

Retail Solutions provides SaaS software to retail chains in the supermarket and garden center sectors, covering workforce planning, time tracking, accountant integrations, leave management, cost analysis, and labor law compliance.

My work spanned the platform broadly — I built APIs for accountant integrations serving chains like Hoogvliet, Jumbo, and C1000, developed a powerful rules engine for workforce planning driven by per-location configurable rule sets (function, age, CAO, legal requirements), and refactored core platform code alongside building a flexible data integration layer for importing, mapping, and exporting across external systems.

Boot Framework is an open-source project born out of a practical need. At Retail Solutions, background processes ran as plain PHP scripts. Symfony 2 was too complex for the team to adopt fully, so I built a lightweight alternative that offered its best components without the overhead.

The framework proved its value again at Beslist.nl, where APIs processed 1.5 million requests per day with a maximum average response time of 100ms — too fast for full Symfony at the time. We used Silex for webservices. As a Symfony developer, I missed the Symfony commands and Dependency Injection. We used Boot Framework for several console applications and queue consumers.

At Lajos, I engineered solutions for a wide range of clients using PHP, Symfony 2, and Node.js. A key achievement was developing a real-time auction platform utilizing Redis Pub/Sub and WebSockets for seamless live bidding.

I also enhanced the "National Amusement Parks Pass" website (nappas.nl) by integrating payment gateways and multilingual support. Other contributions included building a custom RBAC module for Zend Framework 2, rendering 2D images with custom diagrams, developing batch import tools for a car trading platform, and implementing image recognition for wine brand identification.

At Sitedeals.nl I developed new plugins and refactored existing functionality for the new version of the vBulletin platform.

A significant part of the work focused on optimizing MySQL queries and processes for better performance, the implementation a bidding system, and implementing various REST APIs for SEO statistics, domain information, and Cloudflare integration.

A regional automotive leasing company needed to automate their online advertising operations across a major Dutch marketplace. With roughly 1,000 active listings, manual management was no longer feasible.

I designed and built custom automation software that streamlined their advertising workflow and optimized cost-per-click positioning, saving significant manual effort and improving ad visibility.

At Ridon Steigerbouw I mapped out the company's business processes and built custom software that automated labor-intensive tasks around employee scheduling, time tracking, project management, and invoicing.

I also designed and built the company website from scratch, wrote all the copy optimized for Google, and ran online advertising campaigns. The site ranked organically on the first page of Google for relevant industry terms for an extended period.

Before becoming a professional developer, I spent years tinkering with code. I built simple websites for people in my network, wrote countless PHP scripts for personal projects (most of which never saw the light of day), and taught myself by building things that solved my own problems.

The most ambitious project from this era was a custom web browser built in Delphi using IE6 components. It featured a built-in IRC client and a set of custom tools designed to give me an edge in click-based multiplayer browser games. It was messy, unconventional, and exactly the kind of project that teaches you how software really works.