Matthias
Van Woensel
Engineer, Innovator, Explainer
Passion
💕 Open source, Linux, Automation, Small efficient teams 💕
😠Microsoft Windows, Bureaucracy, Oracle ðŸ˜
Quote
"Don't talk to me, machine."
Technology's primary purpose is to serve humanity, not the other way around.
Skills
Soft Skills
- Good at understanding complex problems, and able to explain them at the level of the listener.
- Loves exchanging ideas.
- Rarely offended.
Programming & Scripting
Other tech
- Mysql/Mariadb (galera cluster)
- Postgresql
- Sqlite
- Arduino
- Distributed storage
Projects
Elixir Image Tools
Wrote an elixir library that leverages Rust to do common operations on images.
- Resizing
- Rotating
- Create webp thumbnails
- Fast
Infra on fly.io
Built a scalable infrastructure with the help of fly.io for a SaaS company (cavalato.be)
Distributed storage
Built out a distributed storage cluster with a mix of off-the-shelf consumer hardware (capacity 24TB)
Food forest
Converted a cornfield into a thriving food forest with my wife.
- Workshops
- Tours
- Teaching
Opendata API
An API that gathers information from various public sources and presents them in a usable format. Main use case: to avoid garbage in -> garbage out in ERP systems.
Platformsh-tools
A collection of bash scripts that can be used on Platform (a Platform as a Service like Heroku), to make the impossible possible, and the difficult easy.
- Automatic blocking of DDoS
- Analyze bandwidth usage
- Visualizing container resource allocations
- Installing brew/pecl packages in user space
Experience
Platform.Sh
2018 - Present
Senior Support Engineer Elite (2018 - Present)
- 30h/week
- Diagnosing issues with the infrastructure
- Communicating with engineers on ways to solve problems
- Diagnosing performance issues and misconfigurations of customer sites and holding their hand in improving this.
Cloud Engineer (2021 - 2022)
- Improved an internal engineering tool called 'hera' so it would be easier to use.
- Added staged rollout mechanism to limit the impact of uncaught bugs in container images
- Maintained container images
Customer Support Engineer (2019 - 2021)
- Oncall: Keep customer sites online
- Upgrading customer server infrastructure
- Improved internal support tooling
- Wrote a GUI control panel (in QT) to assist in managing customer containers more easily
- Wrote various shell scripts to make complex tasks easy for customers.
Carscan BV
Freelance Consulting - Main project: Cavalato
2023 - Present
Responsible for building and maintaining a containerized server infrastructure that is expected to scale up to thousands of users. The engineers at this company have limited operations know-how and currently rely on me.
- Docker containers
- Fly.io
InSyPro BV
CTO - Main project: PlanManager
2008 - 2018
PlanManager. A web based SaaS ERP for body shop and garage management. Built the product from humble beginnings. Started on shared hosting and ended up with a full rack of servers.
I was responsible for the infrastructure and also led a team of engineers creating the product.
- (mostly) PHP
- Custom built web browser in QT (it was 2008... there was no chrome)
Other
Off-grid solar installation
I built an off-grid solar installation on the farm. This allows me to charge my garden equipment and even an electric sit-on mower.
- Just 2 solar panels due to limited space: 800Wp
- Battery bank 12V 400Ah
- Lesson learned: If I would have to do it again, I would use 48V
Education
Karel De Grote, Antwerp
Bachelor Computer Science, Robotics and automation
2004-2008
Funny story: In our last year we had to pick a specialization. I loved programming but decided not to choose it because I hated Java (not script).
I chose Robotics which turned out the be a great decision. I experienced the most interesting months there and learned a lot.
Syntra
Battery Specialist, Evening classes
2021-2022
I wanted to learn how to build and maintain my own off-grid installation.