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BIO

Education

CEPES Jodoigne

2012 - 2014
IT Technician

KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology - De Nayer Campus

2014 - 2017
Bachelor's degree Embedded-ICT

Experience

Ubidata (https://ubidata.com)

September 2017 - Present

Embedded Software Developer

I helped my senior develop the firmware for our new in-house telematics device in C. Some of my contributions :

  • writing drivers for sensors and IC's (magnetometer, charge regulator)
  • refactor our inter-processor communication (SPI, our design has both a high and low power ARM chip)
  • debug and work around hardware issues in software (faulty comm bus)
  • improve the efficiency of our custom TCP/IP protocol
  • improve our u-blox GNSS driver

System Administrator

I have maintained a homelab since I'm 18.
When the previous developer responsible for our infrastructure signaled his intention to leave, I got asked to take over.
We brought in an MSP to assist me.

I became responsible for :

  • our office infra :
    • on-site Active Directory
    • the embedded firmware Jenkins buildserver
    • a PBX VM
    • office networking
  • our colocated datacenter infra :
    • a collection of Dell servers ranging from 5 to 12 years old
    • a mix of Windows Server 2003 / 2008 / 2016
    • a couple of Debian 8 machines
    • two MySQL databases
    • 7 Mbps copper pair

We undertook a modernization effort where we :

  • virtualized physical hosts
  • installed a new ESXi server cluster, consolidated hosts, migrated VM's and decommissioned outdated machines (we managed to halve the amount of machines in the rack)
  • upgraded the network with new HA firewalls and redundant 100Mbps fiber
  • improved storage and backups
  • reconfigured the databases for improved performance and resiliency (we dropped the cpu load-average by 60% and reduced the maximum replication lag peaks from 2-3 hours to ~15 secs)
  • updated Windows and Linux hosts / VM's to the latest versions
  • improved monitoring
  • migrated our PBX to cloud ip-telephony
  • set up nginx proxies with automated Let's Encrypt renewals
  • set up a postfix SMTP VM with OpenDKIM and proper SPF, DMARC config

I created a small lab that would host a test environment for developers using salvaged servers :

  • a test database
  • a couple of Ubuntu VM's for docker development
  • I introduced and set up our self-hosted Gitlab instance (and migrated the remaining SVN repo's to Git)
  • I created our first Gitlab-CI Runner

Backend Software Developer

After a while, the embedded firmware matured and a two-person team became unnecessary.
Given my experience with our TCP/IP protocol, I moved to the .NET backend team to work on incoming data processing.

My first big project was to write a service to communicate with third-party telematics devices.
As the sole developer on this project, I took the liberty to explore new technologies and methods.
I chose a microservice approach with the idea of having multiple telematics front-ends that would translate communication from and to a common abstracted data processing pipeline.
We successfully used this approach to quickly support additional telematics devices over the years.

  • the services are written in .NET core
  • inter-service communication happens with Protobuf messages over Redis queues
  • the services expose performance metrics over Grpc. A small worker fetches these regularly and feeds them to our Grafana
  • care is taken to leverage async IO to improve throughput
  • the services are dockerized and managed with docker-compose
  • this solution has been handling 1000's of messages/minute mostly trouble-free on a small 2 cpu/4Gb ram Ubuntu VM ever since :)

Lead Developer

Eventually, a technical leadership position opened up internally and I offered to become the lead developer.
My main focus was to improve the quality of our massive legacy codebase :

  • we first agreed on stronger coding conventions
  • I mandated systematic code reviews
  • I introduced more widespread usage of CI/CD
  • we migrated or even completely rewrote services as old as .NET Framework 2.0 to .NET core
  • we standardized our library usage (ex: Dapper, NUnit, NLog)
  • I promoted Docker (the previous company standard was zipped release folders over FTP)
  • we broke down big legacy monoliths into smaller services (while trying to avoid falling into the picoservices trap)
  • I mentored developers in better SQL usage (Use The Index, Luke became our bible for a while :)
  • I reviewed and validated new software architectures
  • I evangelized new technologies inside the company

One big project I led during that time was the development of our new Track And Trace V2 web API.
We decided to develop a new API in .NET Core instead of migrating the existing .NET Framework 4.5 one.
Starting fresh allowed us to choose a better architecture and improve our public API design.

  • the backend uses ASP.NET core 6
  • we use Swashbuckle for automatic Swagger documentation
  • we try to keep the API consistent and intuitive
  • we use caching extensively to improve responsiveness
  • we monitor request response time to catch slow DB queries
  • we developed a new geocoding Grpc service using an internal Nominatim database replica
  • we developed a new PDF export Grpc service encapsulating Wkhtmltopdf
  • we try to follow OWASP guidelines