Daniel Verstegen

About me:

Creative self-taught full stack software engineer with 9+ years of professional experience.

Experience

2024 - Present

DevOps Engineer V - Albert Heijn Engineering Enablement Platform

Consciously shifted sideways from a leadership position to a more technical role. While also becoming a dad during this time, I have worked in a team of fellow DevOps engineers to design and implement a solid org-wide Kafka Platform. Tailoring to the needs of the organization, ensuring proper governance and providing a smooth developer experience. In a large organization like Albert Heijn, automation and proactive enabling are essential to keep the velocity of dev teams high.

• Designed, built and operated a data replication pipeline using several MirrorMaker2 clusters, enabling a zero downtime consumer-moves-first migration between Kafka clusters
• Updated legacy custom Helm charts to be forwards compatible with a new Kubernetes environment and its custom resources
• Deployed and operated multiple legacy Strimzi Kafka clusters on a new Kubernetes environment
• Designed and co-wrote the org-wide consolidated Kafka Infra As Code framework using Pulumi TypeScript, running on GitHub Actions. Utilizing an adapter pattern to reduce vendor lock risk and ensuring backwards compatibility with existing systems
• Operated multiple Kafka Connect Clusters running on Azure AKS
• Revised the legacy Kafka Connect IaC tooling to use and run on Strimzi based Kafka Connect
• Designed and implemented the GitHub Action pipelines for Kafka Connect image building, enabling streamlined Kafka Connect plugin management
• Provide technical support to teams utilizing Kafka

2022 - 2024

Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Manager & PO - ChargePoint

Assumed a more leading and facilitating role in a core software domain after a reorganisation. In this role I am backed by the many learnings of past years, and apply them in such a way so that our team can enjoy a healthy way of working and priorities are set with a good balance between new features, tech debt and support tickets.

• Leading a team, where we own the vehicle domain and legacy ViriCiti systems
• Facilitating scrum ceremonies
• Managing product backlog, incoming support tickets and addressing technical debt
• Organizing and performing 1 on 1's and feedback sessions
• Facilitating periodic Way of Working meetings
• Conducting code reviews
• Facilitating knowledge sharing sessions
• Steering and making architectural decisions
• Key player and engineering representative in multi stakeholder initiatives
• Member of advisory cloud software council, where I advocate for a "you build it you own it" mentality
• Rebuilt legacy J1939 DM processor into scalable Kafka Streams application using Kotlin

2017 - 2022

Lead Developer - ViriCiti, later part of ChargePoint

Starting in a junior software engineering role I have developed myself over the course of four years to become a Senior Software Engineer and Lead Developer. Now, together with an amazing team I'm building, maintaining and owning multiple legacy & modern services/architectures in our domain driven microservices framework. One day you're digging in the bits and bytes of a CAN-frame, the next you're spinning up 12 replicas of a service you've built.

• Massively refactored and improved legacy event streaming service
• Built efficient Kafka to AWS S3 offloader
• Implemented 3rd party SSO SAML2.0/OAuth2 support
• Co-wrote back end architecture for new domain using federated Apollo GraphQL services
• Acquired solid understanding of Mongo aggregations (and their verbosity...)
• Built services integrating with 3rd party ITCS systems
• Built several NodeJS and Rust apps running on our in-vehicle device
• Built IFTTT-like service for sending commands to vehicles
• Maintained and improved public WebSocket server; exposing live data streams
• Performing job interviews
• Organizing hackathons
• Organizing and performing 1 on 1's and feedback sessions
• Lots more that I can't remember

2016

Freelance

Successfully demonstrated insecurity of Android apps for the AVROTROS TV show "Opgelicht?! Cybercrime" during live stand-up comedy show.

• RAT Android app with hand-built (lol don't do that) TCP communication protocol
• Java C&C server
• ExpressJS file server

2007 - 2016

Bartender & Manager - Café de Laurierboom

9 Fantastic years working and running the family bar.

• Cash counting Android app connecting to (dad's) custom-built Access back office
• Python server for syncing data
• Small contributions to AOSP Cyanogenmod
• Android APK code injector script h4x
• Lots and lots of gezelligheid

2004 - 2007

Kitchen Staff - Bistro 't Stuivertje

Coming of age, learning a tonne from my strict, but awesome chef

• Dishwashing, later cold side

Always be Coding

Pet Projects

I like to build things in my spare time

• pont.app | repo

  Server-side rendered schedule app for the Amsterdam GVB ferry times, with auto GTFS importing

  Rust, Rocket, Sqlite, GTFS, Nginx

• Can holder | model

  Can holder to easily bring in your cans for deposit. (Picked up by Amsterdam based paper Het Parool)

  Fusion 360, Concepts

• vbpool.web.app | repo

  Responsive digital version of the football pool form we do at the bar, with auto saving functionality

  VueJS, Firebase

• esp32-woohoo | repo

  3D printed, battery powered ESP32 + BME280 sensor project, using MQTT protocol for data transfer and Prometheus as for timeseries storage

  CAD, Arduino, Rust, MQTT, Prometheus, Grafana

Education

2016

Codaisseur

Intensive two month web development bootcamp

• Ruby on Rails, ES6, React, git, NodeJS, functional programming, and more

2001 - 2006

Montessori Lyceum Amsterdam

Not much to see here...

• HAVO