Michiel Boekhoff
Nottingham
Summary
My passion has always been software engineering. I have been coding since I was 13 and realised quickly that this was what I wanted to do. During all of these years, I've settled into a mix of a back-end software engineer and a platform engineer using public cloud.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work History
Contractor
Tide Through 101 Ways
08.2023 - 10.2023
- Developed business-critical services in Java to facilitate fraud prevention.
- Helped to introduce more cohesive forms of tests to ensure functionality functioned as expected.
- Supported a large-scale migration from an old, legacy stack to a new reference architecture.
Contractor
Attest Through 101 Ways
01.2023 - 08.2023
- Led the build of an entirely new business vertical (video surveys).
- Developed Go microservices deployed on AWS EKS using state-of-the-art technology like Kafka & Linkerd.
- Pushed for BDD.
- Worked to secure access to crucial PII.
Contractor
Atos
07.2022 - 01.2023
- Worked as an infrastructure engineer specialist within the company on various projects.
- Handled AWS, GCP & Azure infrastructure.
- Acted as a consultant within the enterprise to deliver scalable, maintainable solutions.
- Created serverless functions in Go using AWS Lambda & Azure Functions.
- Wrote microservices in Kotlin and Go.
Contractor
Attest Through 101 Ways
02.2022 - 07.2022
- Led a team of three to expand the audience reach across new markets.
- Developed Java 18 & Spring Boot, and Go microservices deployed on AWS EKS.
- Used Kafka to decouple services from their upstream event producers.
- Used DynamoDB as a NoSQL database.
- Helped to implement service-level tests.
- Pushed for contract tests using Pact.
- Helped migrate to GitHub Actions from Jenkins.
Contractor
Marshmallow
09.2021 - 02.2022
- Helped expand the business by designing and developing a home insurance product.
- Developed Java 17 & Spring Boot microservices deployed on AWS.
- Led the initiative for the business to employ contract testing using Pact to verify cross-service interoperability.
- Helped build the AWS infrastructure for this product, using Terraform and deployed as part of a Jenkins CI pipeline.
- Helped the business migrate to mainline development from Gitflow.
Contractor
Sky
Leeds, UK
03.2021 - 09.2021
- Worked to develop large-scale, customer-facing services in Scala.
- Helped to develop and made recommendations to migrate to a modern tech stack with Kubernetes.
- Helped to develop and improve pipelines and continuous delivery.
- Helped mentor junior developers.
- Pushed for fixing tech debt and deployment setup, such as automated secrets deployment & management.
- Contributed to an application by being responsible for my team’s changes by volunteering to help pipeline reliability.
Contractor
Truphone
12.2020 - 03.2021
- Responsible for architecting and developing a new way of delivering mobile phone data usage to business customers.
- Owning several microservices written in Java using Spring Boot and some Go.
- Designing and testing high-performance solutions, particularly using Apache Kafka and AWS-managed services.
- Responsible for setting and recommending new, best practices for the business and for cross-functional teams.
- Pushing for better-supporting infrastructure to aid application delivery, such as service mesh.
Contractor
Keysight
07.2020 - 12.2020
- Responsible for setting up and maintaining all infrastructure, both internal and customer-facing, particularly Kubernetes clusters using Kubespray and EKS clusters using Terraform.
- Set up a GitOps workflow using the Flux Kubernetes operator & ArgoCD.
- Set up and managed a private cloud using OpenStack.
- Automated the deployment of a PaaS solution to end customers using Terraform, Ansible, Kustomize and Go.
- Set up & managed automatic certificate provisioning using cert-manager.
- Implemented a secrets solution with Vault, including automated credentials rotation.
- Facilitated the migration from a traditional reverse proxy to an API gateway using Kong.
- Helped implement progressive rollout using Flagger.
- Set up a service mesh using Istio.
- Wrote microservices in Go to elegantly solve architectural problems.
- Managed various Ceph clusters.
- Helped debug various network issues, for example, issues with OpenStack & on-prem networking hardware.
Contractor
Sky
London, UK
10.2019 - 07.2020
- As a Java Developer, I helped develop several microservices in Java (8 & 11) and Scala
- Helped educate people about reactive architecture (mainly using Micronaut and ReactiveX)
- Aided the migration from on-prem VMs to GCP.
- Designed and developed a new container repository solution using GCR.
- Implemented several Kubernetes plugins (admission webhooks and operators mainly) in Go to help with business-specific use cases.
- Helped implement a GitOps approach by championing technologies such as sealed secrets, Flux, Istio & Flagger.
- Aided in the migration from manual Pact contract testing to using Pact Broker.
- Helped migrate from Kubernetes 1.10 to 1.16.
- Paired with key team members to disseminate knowledge of technologies; practised XP.
- Helped to instil a culture of TDD in Go.
- Improved service resiliency on several fronts by leveraging cloud-native and Kubernetes best practices.
- Aided in the migration away from Oracle 12c to other database solutions (including but not limited to PostgreSQL, and MongoDB)
Contractor
Oddschecker
London, UK
04.2019 - 08.2019
- Worked for a comparison site for bets from different
- Bookmakers, as part of a complete redevelopment of their platform.
- Worked as part of an Agile (Kanban) team, developing microservices that were deployed on Kubernetes using Helm.
- Used Java 11, Spring Boot and Camel to create, from scratch, a generic system that would ingest large quantities of data from bookmaker APIs.
- Helped improve the existing infrastructure to use Python 3 and pioneered concurrent pipelines on GitLab CI within the company.
- Set up alerting and monitoring using Grafana, powered by Prometheus.
- Created a Camel test slice usable with JUnit 5, unlike the official Camel test support.
- Championed the use of tools like Telepresence to aid in the debugging and testing of our services.
- Gained experience using the Google Cloud Platform during this time; both professionally and personally at home.
- Did a lot of pair programming and mentoring of other developers.
- Developed Python microservices using Flask
Contractor
OpenCredo
London, UK
01.2019 - 03.2019
- Worked for a challenger bank based in London through OpenCredo, as part of developing an online bank platform as a service.
- Worked as part of an Agile (Scrum) team to develop and maintain the suite of customer origination and management services.
- Used Java 8 - 11 and Spring Boot to develop, using TDD, microservices deployed on EKS (Kubernetes) with a service mesh (Linkerd 1.x). Similarly maintained said services including all ops needs, which included exposing our apps through Apigee.
- Used Terraform to write infrastructure as code.
- Used Kafka as a pub-sub messaging system.
- Used Avro as a standard, binary communication protocol over Kafka.
- Helped migrate from AWS DynamoDB to the more relational CockroachDB.
- Used Swagger extensively to document our APIs.
- Migrated some services over to Kotlin.
Full Stack Engineer
BJSS
Nottingham, UK
08.2018 - 01.2019
- Responsible for working on different projects with different clients as a full-stack engineer, all within an Agile (Scrum) environment, including industry leaders in finance and construction supplies.
- Worked with cloud technologies and various deployment models, in order to accelerate business growth.
- Used Java 8 and TDD to develop a payment platform for one of the biggest builders merchants in the UK. Included developing a RESTful JSON API, and a Bootstrap & jQuery based, ES6 front-end library.
- Helped refine the deployment strategy with Terraform & Ansible.
- Integrated the payment platform with a third-party payment provider, who exposed a SOAP API, using Apache Camel.
- Gained AWS DevOps Professional (included CloudFormation experience) & Certified Azure Developer certifications.
- Practiced TDD using JUnit, Mockito and Spring Test. Also in charge of developing end-to-end and performance (Gatling) tests.
- Integrated our components using an off-the-shelf message bus, using JMS.
- Wrote open-source TypeScript code (on GitHub).
- Experimented, in my own time, with Kubernetes, in particular setting up a production-grade, high availability Kubernetes cluster, setting up a service mesh with Istio and developing applications for Kubernetes.
- Created Python APIs using Flask
DevSecOps Engineer
Experian ECS
Nottingham, UK
08.2017 - 08.2018
- Acted as the DevSecOps engineer for our domain.
- Responsible for creating and maintaining a suite of RESTful, JSON-producing microservices and creating new consumer-facing products in Java (8+).
- Used both Maven and Gradle.
- Part of an Agile (Scrum) team.
- Championed a CICD (TravisCI) pipeline and several integrations into our workflow, including SonarQube for quality analysis and Veracode for security vulnerabilities.
- Held the title of security champion in charge of maintaining the security of our service suite.
- Responsible for extending and maintaining legacy systems written in Python 2 and Java, including some Ruby, Perl and Bash.
- Wrote utility scripts in Python 3.
- Pushed for the containerization of services to make deployment less error-prone.
- Wrote tools to benefit developer productivity in Ruby.
- In my spare time, acquired knowledge of popular cluster management tools and deployment strategies, such as Kubernetes and automated deployments using Forge. Also contributed to several Ruby projects on GitHub.
- Practised TDD/BDD using Spock, Mockito, JUnit 5 and Spring Test.
- Implemented caching using Spring and Redis.
- Used Redis as a low-latency KV store.
- Refactored security proxy, written in NodeJS, into testable, extensible ES6 code.
- Integrated with many cloud services such as SQS, SNS, Lambda and S3.
- Was the engineer on a cross-functional team that pioneered the use of Apigee to expose our APIs to selected partners.
- Skills acquired: large-scale microservice architecture, contract testing (Pact), Docker, furthered coding standards, deployment in a large-scale, distributed environment, maintenance of legacy components both in Python and Java and contributing to large projects (both internal and open-source).
Full Stack Engineer
Marks Electrical Ltd
Leicester, UK
01.2017 - 08.2017
- Developed a critical, fault-tolerant in-house management system for stock, sales orders and pricing using Scala and Java (8), also some Ruby as a full-stack engineer.
- TDD was a large part of the culture.
- Responsible for the infrastructure of this new service.
- Maintained forks of open-source projects for internal use.
- Helped migrate critical components of the website to a new, serverless architecture in Java.
- Maintained most of the new infrastructure, which was built on EC2 and ECS (running on Docker containers).
- Skills acquired; Scala, C#, .NET Core, Ruby, React, Redux, CQRS, AWS Lambda, EC2, functional programming paradigms, Docker, Agile.
Full Stack Engineer
Mindera
Leicester, UK
09.2016 - 12.2016
- Developed high-performance applications in Java for various companies, primarily Appscatter.
- Skills acquired; collaboration with international teams, Java knowledge, self-management and the deployment cycle of high-performance applications, TDD, Agile.
Full Stack Engineer
TeachClub
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
09.2015 - 09.2016
- Supported & extended legacy CodeIgniter (PHP) application.
- Following deprecation, developed full front-end (Ember.js) and back-end (Ruby on Rails) for an educational platform to connect tutors to students for educational support.
- Skills acquired; CodeIgniter, leadership, organisation, communication, work flow, BDD and Ruby (on Rails).
Tutor
College
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
07.2014 - 03.2016
- Tutored students in Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Spanish and IT, at Spinoza Lyceum (equivalent of college).
- Skills acquired; patience, problem solving, adapting to different teaching methods, and communication with both colleagues and students.
Software Engineer
First Center Publishing BV
Almere, The Netherlands
07.2014 - 02.2015
- Supported internal CRM/CMS in PHP and mitigated several important security vulnerabilities, including but not limited to SQL injections, weak hash algorithms and some XSS.
- Full front-end (Ember.js, Angular, CoffeeScript, jQuery) and back-end (Ruby on Rails) development of a web application with the purpose of integrating a new workflow and to
ease communication between graphical designers, publishers and editorial staff - Wrote code in Java
- System administrator for Mac OS X & Debian servers (Apache, nginx), performing maintenance during system outages and setting up deployment environments.
- Integrated features of the new workflow into a desktop application (Qt, Objective-C, C).
- Skills acquired; communication with stakeholders, independent working, project management, time management for deadlines, TDD and Ruby (on Rails).
Education
Alevels -
Spinoza Lyceum
Peter Van Anrooystraat 8, 1076 BH, Amsterdam2014
Languages
Dutch
Native language
Dutch
Proficient
C2
English
Proficient
C2
Spanish
Upper intermediate
B2
SELF-TAUGHT SKILLS AND PERSONAL PROJECTS
- Used automation (Terraform and Ansible, mainly) to set up private Kubernetes clusters, utilising Istio as a service mesh and GoCD as the continuous integration system on GCP.
- Made some functions with the Fn framework as a vendor-agnostic serverless (FaaS, to be precise) provider.
- Experimented with Knative to implement serverless on Kubernetes.
- Experimented with GraalVM to AoT compile Java applications to an executable.
- Developed and deployed Go applications onto Kubernetes
- Used Chaos Monkey to do resiliency testing on private cluster.
- Used Envoy, which is the data plane provided by Istio, to implement several approaches to bolster service resiliency (think circuit breaker & retries).
- Tinkered with newer versions of Gradle, optimising it to see how fast it could be, particularly for multi-module projects.
- Implemented a GitOps workflow using Flux, Flagger and sealed secrets, with automated canary roll-outs.
Timeline
Contractor
Tide Through 101 Ways
08.2023 - 10.2023
Contractor
Attest Through 101 Ways
01.2023 - 08.2023
Contractor
Atos
07.2022 - 01.2023
Contractor
Attest Through 101 Ways
02.2022 - 07.2022
Contractor
Marshmallow
09.2021 - 02.2022
Contractor
Sky
03.2021 - 09.2021
Contractor
Truphone
12.2020 - 03.2021
Contractor
Keysight
07.2020 - 12.2020
Contractor
Sky
10.2019 - 07.2020
Contractor
Oddschecker
04.2019 - 08.2019
Contractor
OpenCredo
01.2019 - 03.2019
Full Stack Engineer
BJSS
08.2018 - 01.2019
DevSecOps Engineer
Experian ECS
08.2017 - 08.2018
Full Stack Engineer
Marks Electrical Ltd
01.2017 - 08.2017
Full Stack Engineer
Mindera
09.2016 - 12.2016
Full Stack Engineer
TeachClub
09.2015 - 09.2016
Tutor
College
07.2014 - 03.2016
Software Engineer
First Center Publishing BV
07.2014 - 02.2015
Alevels -
Spinoza Lyceum