About Me
Below you can find my resumé, and for those réally interested, also my Bio. For quicker navigation, jump to my:
Resumé
My full resumé can also be downloaded as pdf.
Summary
I am an experienced software engineer with a strong affinity for IoT and hardware development. My main languages are Python, Typescript and embedded C, using TDD and CI/CD practices. I am very hands-on, and eager to explore new technologies. My experience has given me breadth of knowledge, without sacrificing technical depth. As solutions architect, I love understanding problems both on the technical side and from a user’s perspective. First and foremost I am an engineer, but I am also very aware of the business consequences of engineering choices. I have contributed plugins and bugfixes to multiple Open Source software products and in my last role at Therma, I designed the LoRaWAN IoT infrastructure, back-end and machine learning pipeline for two products in commercial refrigeration and HVAC in the food industry in the US. These led to them getting their $19M Series A funding, and resulted in two provisional patent applications.
Patents
- Provisional application: U.S. Application No. 63/389,818: INTELLIGENT CONTROL OF EQUIPMENT USING SENSORS
- Provisional application: Still in draft regarding energy control of commercial refrigeration.
Professional experience
- 2022 - 2023Solutions Architect at Therma, Cebu City, Cebu, The Philippines.
- Architecture of IoT infrastructure (LoRaWAN, Chirpstack, AWS IoT, RabbitMQ, Influxdb, Redis, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes and FluxCI/CD), machine learning pipeline (Python, Kubernetes and Docker containers) and backend (Typescript and Next.js) for their HVAC/R energy product.
- Technical lead of the US based energy product development team of 6 engineers.
- Collaborate with the hardware engineer in designing a hardware prototype for smart refrigeration energy management.
- Support HVAC/R technicians and operational managers in installation and field testing of our off-the-shelf and prototype hardware in 50 refrigeration and HVAC units in restaurants in the bay area.
- This product was pivotal in Therma closing its $19M Series A funding.
- Contribute to the filing of 2 provisional patent applications.
- 2019 - 2022 Lead IoT Engineer at CoInspect Philippines Inc (dba Therma), Cebu City, Cebu, The Philippines.
- Build the Philippine embedded team of 6 engineers towards independence, in charge of the IoT infrastructure and software-hardware integration of Therma’s monitoring platform for commercial refrigeration.
- Design and setup the IoT infrastructure (LoRaWAN, AWS IoT, RabbitMQ, Chirpstack, Kubernetes) for Therma’s monitoring product.
- Prototype hardware design (PCB, schematics and CAD) and development for Therma’s own gateways and sensors, collaborating with a consultant for the actual manufacturing.
- Firmware development (using embedded C and C++, OpenWRT, PlatformIO, Armbian and STM32) for Therma’s own sensors and gateways
- Once the team was built up, I was able to move on to the development of the new energy product.
- The product was in constant use at around 4000 restaurants and educational institutes in the US and beyond.
- Together with the energy product this product was pivotal for Therma closing its $19M Series A funding.
- 2016 - present Consultant
- Geospatial and scientific data analysis and visualization and co-authoring the report for the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Marine Wildlife Watch of the Philippines and funded by the German GIZ, of a large Marine Turtle monitoring dataset covering 20 years of data. The age of the dataset and inconsistent monitoring effort made the data cleanup and consultancy on what questions could actually be answered with the data an interesting and fun but tough challenge.
- Design and build a smart classroom and dormitory system at Foundation University, Dumaguete, The Philippines. This served as an educational tool to teach students software and IoT engineering practices, and provide Capstone topics for their Computer Science education.
- Lead the Nightowl technhology incubator at Foundation University, Dumaguete, The Philippines
- 2016 - 2019 Partner at East Solar Works
- Investigate new technologies (mostly direct PV solar pumping using Variable Frequency Drives) and opportunities for the local solar market in the Philippines
- Structure the pre-sales and engineering processes for domestic and municipal solar installation projects.
- Build a custom monitoring tool to replace a badly designed manufacturer supplied solution for a solar inverter.
- 2014 - 2016 Science Officer at Marine Conservation Philippines MCP is a non-profit nature conservation organization, funded by its volunteer program. My main responsibility was research and monitoring setup and execution, and supervision of interns and volunteers in those activities as well as coordination of conservation efforts with stakeholders. Later on my role shifted towards technical activities like data management and analysis, GIS and remote sensing.
- 2013 - 2014Lecciones Amazonicas project coordinator at Amazon Fund, Bolivia Coordination of an environmental education project in two consecutive secondary school years, in the Bolivian Amazon. Responsibilities included design and layout (in LateX) of educational material for a field practical and ecology course for secondary schools, and the coordination of the project with schools, teachers, directors, the municipality and local indigenous guides. The educational material was published in a web-portal that I implemented in Drupal.
- 2010 - 2013Chief Technical Officer at Proigia
- Co-founding a company, eventually with around 7 employees, building business intelligence software (using Python, PostgreSQL and PostGIS) used at large primary healthcare practices and cooperatives in the Netherlands. The customers covered the large majority of patients in multiple metropolitan areas and smaller towns. The company still exists and some of the original employees I hired are still there, but at my exit, the company was taken over by a larger competitor.
- Design and build the web-based reporting software and web-based GIS.
- Consult with doctors and managers to create useful efficiency and quality of care reports for internal use and external accountability. This involved highly complex queries and the development of a unified data model across 7 different sources of customer data.
- Cooperate with 7 electronic medical record software vendors to extract our customers data from their system, and understand their data models.
- Cooperate with vendors in strategic partnerships to integrate our product into theirs.
- Take part in technical health care platforms covering data privacy and development of medical reporting standards.
- 2004 - 2013Independent contractor in Elcyon.
- System and network administration at various companies
- System administration at the main office of my university
- Web-design and web-application development for university and private customers
- Proof of concept web-based GIS development, which culminated in the founding of Proigia.
Education and certifications
- 2021The Things Certified Advanced, The Things Certified Network Management, The Things Certified Security LoRaWAN certifications at The Things Industries, The Netherlands
- SSI Dive Control Specialist at Island Divers, Cambodia.
- MSc in Biology, Wageningen University, The Netherlands Specialization Tropical ecology and a minor in Geographic Information Science with a thesis in Mozambique and internship in Honduras
Skills
- Data science:
- R, Python, Jupyter, Pandas, SciPy, SPSS, AWS SageMaker
- Programming languages:
- Python, Embedded C/C++, Typescript, Lua, Javascript, PHP, Java
- IoT and Infrastructure:
- MQTT, RabbitMQ, LoRaWAN, WiFi, LTE, Powerline, PoE, AWS IoT, AWS SQS/Lambda/SNS
- Dev-ops tools/services:
- Github/Lab/etc, Kubernetes, GitOps, FluxCD, TravisCI, Ansible, Jenkins, Vagrant, AWS EC2, Heroku, Nginx, Apache
- Databases:
- PostgreSQL, InfluxDB, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, SQLite
- Hardware & Embdedded:
- STM32, Atmel, ESP8266, Arduino, FreeRTOS, PlatformIO, Make, OpenWRT, Armbian, Fusion360, PCB Design
- Web development frameworks:
- Flask, NestJS, NodeJS, Express, FastAPI, Angular, Ionic, React, Drupal, Pylons
- GIS:
- PostGIS, QGIS, Grass GIS, OpenLayers, Leaflet, GeoExt, Geoserver, GDAL, Geonetwork
- Languages:
- Dutch, English, Spanish, French, German
Bio
I hold an MSc in biology from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. My major thesis was on mangrove ecology in Mozambique and my internship on the mangrove dwelling iguana Ctenosaurus bakeri on Utila, Honduras. My minor thesis was on GIS and was a proof-of-concept on transforming 3D models from CAD programs to 3D formats usable in GIS for 3D visualisation on the web.
But well before uni I already started messing with computers, with one of my earlier accomplishments being screwing up my fathers 386XT computer by installing Windows 95 (it was running windows 3.11) and thus screwing up the harddrive drivers. Although a friend of mine fixed it, my father never trusted me with computers again.
During uni I started to teach myself web-design, system administration, Linux and later on programming. It resulted in different jobs as system administrator, and in me working as an independent contractor setting up and managing servers and networks for a few companies and later also doing programming and database work. It culminated in starting a company together with a friend that offered a business intelligence SAAS platform and consultancy for GP’s and other healthcare practitioners. I was the technical brains of the company. The majority of the work concerned extracting datasets from other applications and translating big unwieldy datasets, into real-life questions and answers for healthcare providers. On the presentation side we had a reporting web-application and a GIS web-application showing geographical representations of data. As a hobby I got interested in electronics and hacking, and became a member of the hackerspace NURDspace. After a few years my company grew to about 7 employees, by which time it was time for me to change my life and I left.
During my university years I did a fair share of travelling in the tropics and me and my wife were itching to get back into nature conservation again. So we packed our bags and left the Netherlands to go travel, volunteer and live abroad. We ran an environmental education project in Bolivia for half a year and volunteered for a marine conservation project in Cambodia. Being divers and ecologists, we wanted to work in marine conservation and found a job as science officer with Marine Conservation Philippines. My role changed from being in charge of the conservation and scientific side of the organization to more technical activities like data analysis and reporting, remote sensing and setting up a web-mapping system. This job was very diverse and ranged from designing scientific research, marine monitoring programs, scientific data collection, management and analysis (PostgreSQL and R), setting up the spatial data infrastructure and doing all mapping and remote sensing activities, supervising interns and volunteers, consulting local government and people’s organizations in their marine conservation activities and much more. On the technical side I also managed the IT infrastructure and developed and maintained a scientific data entry and management application.
In 2016 I decided that although there a there a lot of interesting projects I worked on at MCP, my skills were best used by using technology to support conservation organizations. I furthermore missed software development and more technological work so decided to become a freelance consultant. I have always enjoyed wrestling with and analyzing large amounts of data (geographic and otherwise) and visualizing it in user-friendly ways (usually web-based). From a scientific point of view, that is where I think I can be of most value. I also enjoy helping businesses become more effective/efficient by implementing technological solutions. So when I was asked by East Solar Works to become a partner and aid them with making their solar water pumping business more efficient by implementing remote monitoring and management software and optimizing their business processes, I accepted. Since the work is sporadic, it still allows me to operate as freelance consultant. And what started to be voluntary activities at Foundation University in Dumaguete in supporting a newly established hackerspace, quickly turned into an offer to be employed at the College of Computer Studies as a consultant for two days a week. They asked me to help start projects and support the establishment of a hackerspace/makerspace where we build “cool” technology stuff, preferably for environmentally or socially relevant projects. Most activities are extra-curricular for the students, but I also aid students with their thesis projects, and advise the college dean on research and education strategy. Recently we are trying to lift this initiative to a higher level with tighter cooperation with the industry and looking for grants to enable this. This job allows me to work more closely with young and enthusiastic Filipino’s and to finally give voice to my long-lived desire to show kids from all walks of life that with access to a computer and internet you can make a living, no matter what your education or upbringing. According to other people I can be quite hyperactive and passionate in my opinions (I still don’t believe them though). I love to try and learn new things and am quick to understand problems and new theory. I have a very analytical mind. I love solving technical problems much more than managing and having meetings. The more difficult the problem, the more I am committed in solving it.