About me

July 20, 2014

I like to ride heelys for transportation, talk about opensource technology, and love creating electronic music.

I started out as a dutch softwareengineer after getting my Bachelor degree in Computer Science. After an awesome startup-experience, I became an independent devtrepeneur. Becoming independent was scary, but one of the best decisions of my life. Technology allows individuals to accomplish amazing things which do not necessarily require managers,offices etc (a startup).

Thats why I see myself as a micropreneur, bootstrapper, soloSaaS (you name it).

Factoids

• Email: info@leon.vankammen.eu
• Date of Birth: 12-04-1981
• worked for companies as devops, VP Engineering, lead dev, lead deployment, lead test, and consultant (freelance and as employee)
• Gender: Male
• Worldposition: Europe
• City: Groningen (Holland) and Budapest (Hungary)
• Languages: Dutch (native), English (writing good, speech good enough), Hungarian (should be improved)
• Education: Bachelor degree in CS (Saxion Enschede/The Netherlands)
• Platform: Windows, Linux, BSD, Sun Solaris, and a bit of mac.
• Favourite Tech: coffeescript, nodejs, docker, bash
• Favourite quote: “lean and mean is the ‘good enough’-sweetspot”

Contact me

I’m happy to receive mail, so you can contact me at info@leon.vankammen.eu for business- or techrelated topics.

Hire me

I’m available for consulting using skype or google hangout. I’m no longer taking on programming projects, since my solo-projects are my current focus atm.

Favourite books

• ‘psychology of computer programming’ (Gerald M. Weinberg)
• ‘getting real’ (37 signals)
• ‘the mythical man month’ (Fred Brooks)
• ‘Yoga Sutras’ (Patanjali)

Real-world achievements

In the past I’ve managed all B2B integrations in a startup from design till production-ready till support-flows. I was responsible for realizing middle-ware-ish integrations to travel-partners like Booking.com, Agoda, Easytobook.com.

Another achievement is being responsible for setting up an physical office for developers, as well as a virtual (cloud) office. This also involved creating an infrastructure with private chat/issuetracker/pastesystem/GIT infrastructure/server infrastructure/automated deployment, testing and documentation.

During this, I also became acquanted with interviewing and hiring back- and frontend developers, architect of software projects, reviewing of code, license-compatibility research, devops, lead programmer of REST- and/or API integrations.

Last but not least: I have contributed to- and started opensource projects, opensource and free-software has been my greatest teacher of all.

Vision on software development

Inmho there are 2 ways of making software: the correct way, and the incorrect way, and both of them are wrong. In the end it boils down to transparency, playfullness, non-attachment to code or design, KISS (KeepItSimpleStupid), and keeping iterations real by using MoSCoW. I have met and followed many engineers, architects and hobbyist developers. My conclusion is that many things can be done in many ways: with/without planning, with/without fancy methodology XYZ. In the end my favourite model is the ‘Chaos model’ since its one of the few models which promotes non-linear progress.

Cloud environments

Google App Engine, AWS, Rackspace, New relic, papertrail, Heroku, OpenShift, Appfog, cloud9, github, bitbucket, issuetrackers, HAL, basecamp.

Past Projects keywords

Integration, PaaS, SaaS, BaaS, Opensource, RESTful API, integration, aggregation, webpipes, service bus, docker, backend, hooks fanatic, longrunning jobs, syslog logging.

methodologies

Distributed (sys)logging setups & alerting. continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous documentation, ZenCoding, Dutch Government-compliant websites (not easy!), fully automated deployment/unittesting, black- white- and grayboxtesting.

• Rapid Application development
• Extreme programming
• Chaos model
• Waterfall

But also Agile, Scrum, RUP, Spiral- and V-model when budgets are sufficient. And last but not least the ‘forget-models-we-have-a-deadline’-model :)

Look mum!

Parser Generators, Lexical analyzers, Win32/GDI programming, Macromedia Flash MX/8/CS12345.5, MS Visual Studio & Borland Builder Family, DevCPP, Cygwin, OpenGL, OpenAL, c++ VST plugins , BASS, FMOD, FLTK, FreeFrame, GNU GCC / G++, dreamcast game programming. Electribe ESX, Cubase VST/SX, Ableton Live, Buzz/Buze, WaveLab, VST/VSTI/Directx, all MIDI apps, and all other software which has buttons and sliders. Adobe Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, Blender 3D, GIMP, Inkscape, Artgem, gfx2, AcidDraw, and other software which uses a mouse. nodejs, docker, coffeescript, PHP, Javascript, Actionscript 1/2/3, Flex, Haxe, C/C++, PYTHON, Lua, Bash/Shellscript, Java, MySQL, mongodb, redis, Google BigQuery. HTML4/5, CSS1/2/3, WebKit, Websocket, Mobile webapps,PHP/AJAX, MySQL, Javascript frameworks (Mootools,Jquery,Ext,Prototype,Sencha,jstypes,Modernizr,iUI), Flex, Flash, Haxe, shockwave(3D), (X)HTML, XML, Json, YAML, CSS, Javascript, W3C, DHTML, Google Analytics, Adsense, Adwords, Facebook Apps, Facebook Graph API, Facebookwebdevelopers toolkit, PixelBender, Google APP engine, Twitter API, REST API, Layar API, travel API’s like Expedia, Agoda, Paypal API, phonegap api. Rsyslog, winston.