Jilles van Gurp
Chief Technology Officer at FORMATION GmbH- Claim this Profile
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English Full professional proficiency
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Dutch Native or bilingual proficiency
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German Elementary proficiency
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Swedish Elementary proficiency
Topline Score
Bio
Sebastian Waschnick
I would describe Jilles as a great engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit, tons of experience and know-how in nearly all areas needed to create a company or make any product successful. I meet Jilles while we both worked for a project at Bertelsmann, me as a permanent employee and he as one of our first freelancers I hired. A pioneer when it comes to technology, in both ways: Jilles is someone who does an awesome job to stay on top of technology, he also introduced new cool stuff to our project. (I can count how often he actually mentioned Kotlin coroutines until we finally tried them out.) And at the same time, Jilles is someone with a vast amount of experience and knowledge and it’s always surprising with what he's experienced in and how much he already mastered in his career. And everything while still staying pragmatic and looking for the best solution - I haven’t seen Jilles being dogmatic even once. I experienced him not only as a great engineer but also as a great consultant and leader: His conceptional work and his skills to communicate those concepts and architecture are on par with the best I have seen so far. And not to forget: His Spotify metal playlists are also incredible. Still listening to them. I’m really looking forward to working with Jilles again in the future.
Mikko Alasaarela
I have known and worked with Jilles since 2013, when we acquired his Berlin based startup Localstream and he became the lead architect at Inbot. Jilles is the best software architect I have had the privilege of working with. He always thinks ahead, future proofs his designs to the extent the resources allow, and is able to translate and communicate the big picture into a world-class architecture. I have known Jilles as a person who regularly underpromises and overdelivers, and educates everyone around him about the choices and approaches he takes to in his software architectures. He regularly speaks at developer meetups about his cutting edge architectures and technologies and is recognized in the engineering circles as a thought leader. Jilles is a master of search technologies and everything java, but has also expanded his mastery to blockchain development, Kotlin, Rust and Javascript. Jilles is an amazing architect who can make a difference to any project he works on. For me, he has also become a dear friend and mentor in all engineering-related topics.
Marcus Wiberg
I had the opportunity to work with Jilles during the early stages of Matmatch. Jilles brought much experience to the company, well beyond engineering and I enjoyed collaborating with Jilles on strategy, business, and product development. It was a great experience working with you and looking forward to collaborating with you in the future.
Sebastian Waschnick
I would describe Jilles as a great engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit, tons of experience and know-how in nearly all areas needed to create a company or make any product successful. I meet Jilles while we both worked for a project at Bertelsmann, me as a permanent employee and he as one of our first freelancers I hired. A pioneer when it comes to technology, in both ways: Jilles is someone who does an awesome job to stay on top of technology, he also introduced new cool stuff to our project. (I can count how often he actually mentioned Kotlin coroutines until we finally tried them out.) And at the same time, Jilles is someone with a vast amount of experience and knowledge and it’s always surprising with what he's experienced in and how much he already mastered in his career. And everything while still staying pragmatic and looking for the best solution - I haven’t seen Jilles being dogmatic even once. I experienced him not only as a great engineer but also as a great consultant and leader: His conceptional work and his skills to communicate those concepts and architecture are on par with the best I have seen so far. And not to forget: His Spotify metal playlists are also incredible. Still listening to them. I’m really looking forward to working with Jilles again in the future.
Mikko Alasaarela
I have known and worked with Jilles since 2013, when we acquired his Berlin based startup Localstream and he became the lead architect at Inbot. Jilles is the best software architect I have had the privilege of working with. He always thinks ahead, future proofs his designs to the extent the resources allow, and is able to translate and communicate the big picture into a world-class architecture. I have known Jilles as a person who regularly underpromises and overdelivers, and educates everyone around him about the choices and approaches he takes to in his software architectures. He regularly speaks at developer meetups about his cutting edge architectures and technologies and is recognized in the engineering circles as a thought leader. Jilles is a master of search technologies and everything java, but has also expanded his mastery to blockchain development, Kotlin, Rust and Javascript. Jilles is an amazing architect who can make a difference to any project he works on. For me, he has also become a dear friend and mentor in all engineering-related topics.
Marcus Wiberg
I had the opportunity to work with Jilles during the early stages of Matmatch. Jilles brought much experience to the company, well beyond engineering and I enjoyed collaborating with Jilles on strategy, business, and product development. It was a great experience working with you and looking forward to collaborating with you in the future.
Sebastian Waschnick
I would describe Jilles as a great engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit, tons of experience and know-how in nearly all areas needed to create a company or make any product successful. I meet Jilles while we both worked for a project at Bertelsmann, me as a permanent employee and he as one of our first freelancers I hired. A pioneer when it comes to technology, in both ways: Jilles is someone who does an awesome job to stay on top of technology, he also introduced new cool stuff to our project. (I can count how often he actually mentioned Kotlin coroutines until we finally tried them out.) And at the same time, Jilles is someone with a vast amount of experience and knowledge and it’s always surprising with what he's experienced in and how much he already mastered in his career. And everything while still staying pragmatic and looking for the best solution - I haven’t seen Jilles being dogmatic even once. I experienced him not only as a great engineer but also as a great consultant and leader: His conceptional work and his skills to communicate those concepts and architecture are on par with the best I have seen so far. And not to forget: His Spotify metal playlists are also incredible. Still listening to them. I’m really looking forward to working with Jilles again in the future.
Mikko Alasaarela
I have known and worked with Jilles since 2013, when we acquired his Berlin based startup Localstream and he became the lead architect at Inbot. Jilles is the best software architect I have had the privilege of working with. He always thinks ahead, future proofs his designs to the extent the resources allow, and is able to translate and communicate the big picture into a world-class architecture. I have known Jilles as a person who regularly underpromises and overdelivers, and educates everyone around him about the choices and approaches he takes to in his software architectures. He regularly speaks at developer meetups about his cutting edge architectures and technologies and is recognized in the engineering circles as a thought leader. Jilles is a master of search technologies and everything java, but has also expanded his mastery to blockchain development, Kotlin, Rust and Javascript. Jilles is an amazing architect who can make a difference to any project he works on. For me, he has also become a dear friend and mentor in all engineering-related topics.
Marcus Wiberg
I had the opportunity to work with Jilles during the early stages of Matmatch. Jilles brought much experience to the company, well beyond engineering and I enjoyed collaborating with Jilles on strategy, business, and product development. It was a great experience working with you and looking forward to collaborating with you in the future.
Sebastian Waschnick
I would describe Jilles as a great engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit, tons of experience and know-how in nearly all areas needed to create a company or make any product successful. I meet Jilles while we both worked for a project at Bertelsmann, me as a permanent employee and he as one of our first freelancers I hired. A pioneer when it comes to technology, in both ways: Jilles is someone who does an awesome job to stay on top of technology, he also introduced new cool stuff to our project. (I can count how often he actually mentioned Kotlin coroutines until we finally tried them out.) And at the same time, Jilles is someone with a vast amount of experience and knowledge and it’s always surprising with what he's experienced in and how much he already mastered in his career. And everything while still staying pragmatic and looking for the best solution - I haven’t seen Jilles being dogmatic even once. I experienced him not only as a great engineer but also as a great consultant and leader: His conceptional work and his skills to communicate those concepts and architecture are on par with the best I have seen so far. And not to forget: His Spotify metal playlists are also incredible. Still listening to them. I’m really looking forward to working with Jilles again in the future.
Mikko Alasaarela
I have known and worked with Jilles since 2013, when we acquired his Berlin based startup Localstream and he became the lead architect at Inbot. Jilles is the best software architect I have had the privilege of working with. He always thinks ahead, future proofs his designs to the extent the resources allow, and is able to translate and communicate the big picture into a world-class architecture. I have known Jilles as a person who regularly underpromises and overdelivers, and educates everyone around him about the choices and approaches he takes to in his software architectures. He regularly speaks at developer meetups about his cutting edge architectures and technologies and is recognized in the engineering circles as a thought leader. Jilles is a master of search technologies and everything java, but has also expanded his mastery to blockchain development, Kotlin, Rust and Javascript. Jilles is an amazing architect who can make a difference to any project he works on. For me, he has also become a dear friend and mentor in all engineering-related topics.
Marcus Wiberg
I had the opportunity to work with Jilles during the early stages of Matmatch. Jilles brought much experience to the company, well beyond engineering and I enjoyed collaborating with Jilles on strategy, business, and product development. It was a great experience working with you and looking forward to collaborating with you in the future.
Experience
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FORMATION GmbH
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Germany
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Software Development
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1 - 100 Employee
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Chief Technology Officer
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Jul 2020 - Present
Working hard to get this company shipping its product to customers by making the most of our resources, coaching the team to success, and strategically unblocking our sales pipeline with targeted technical solutions. Formation is an exciting startup that combines several of my passions: location based software, indoor, and Kotlin backend. Currently we're operating in stealth mode but we are preparing to go to market soon. While we are preparing to do that, we are also looking to do consultancy on location based or indoor location based systems. We have a wide variety of skills and a lot of domain knowledge that we can use to help you. To learn more check our consultancy page: https://tryformation.com/consulting/ Show less
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Freelancer
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Berlin
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Team, product, or Elasticsearch Consulting
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Apr 2017 - Present
Available for short term/part time projects: - Architecture reviews or workshops - Team trouble shooting - General advice on tech, roadmap, or product - High level advice on search / Elasticsearch related topics Elasticsearch specialist with a 15+ years of experience building search engines using Elasticsearch, Solr, and Lucene. Whether it's devops, search ranking, or search architecture, I can help you make sense of this complex space. Strong points: - Entrepreneurship - Geospatial technologies - Search Engines / ElasticSearch - Leading Remote Teams - Agile Team Management - Technical consulting - Team Workshops / Troubleshooting - Server-side cloud architectures https://tryformation.com/consulting/ https://jillesvangurp.com Show less
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Techstars
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Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
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500 - 600 Employee
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Mentor
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Feb 2021 - Present
Coaching startups in the Berlin Program with team and technology related topics. Coaching startups in the Berlin Program with team and technology related topics.
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Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA
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Germany
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Media Production
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700 & Above Employee
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Freelance Consultant
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Mar 2020 - Jun 2020
Setup and support ingestion pipeline & search engine. Setup and support ingestion pipeline & search engine.
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Cere Network
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Germany
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IT Services and IT Consulting
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1 - 100 Employee
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Lead Architect
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Nov 2019 - Jan 2020
Leading a team of developers in three countries to build the Cere Decentralized data sharing platform while juggling complex requirements, talented engineers, and the general chaos that comes with an early stage tech startup. While no longer involved on a day to day basis, I continue to consult the company on a part time basis. Leading a team of developers in three countries to build the Cere Decentralized data sharing platform while juggling complex requirements, talented engineers, and the general chaos that comes with an early stage tech startup. While no longer involved on a day to day basis, I continue to consult the company on a part time basis.
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Inbot
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Finland
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Business Consulting and Services
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1 - 100 Employee
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CTO
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Dec 2013 - Oct 2019
Inbot (formerly Linko) acquired my startup Localstream in late 2013. After joining, I took charge of the technology platform and became the chief architect and scientist of the company. As such I've had a hand in all aspects of the development, design, and devops related to this and directing the technical strategy of Inbot. Over the years, we went through several iterations of our platform. We started out as a pure Saas play in the CRM space but in several iterations narrowed down on turning Inbot into a mediation platforms where our users could earn rewards by helping our customers get introduced to their network in a privacy respecting way. In 2018 we jumped on the blockchain bandwagon and launched our own token; first on Ethereum and later on Stellar. In terms of technology, I brought the Elasticsearch data platform from Localstream and this quickly became the core of the company. Over the years we did many things with different customers using our homegrown Java/Kotlin backend. We hosted in AWS and setup a state of the art continuous deployment system using cloud-formation, docker, and many technologies in AWS. We built chat bots, smart contact search, and reconstructed an elaborate people graph with from data provided by our users. We also built a token based reward system that integrated into stellar and incentivized our user. To comply with EU rules we built AML and KYC tooling. We ultimately scaled this to 65000 users after a rather successful marketing campaign and dealt successful with all the challenges that came with that. Sadly, after many years of trying many things, we had to decide to shut down the Inbot platform after the company for various reasons. Show less
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SoundCloud
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Germany
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Entertainment Providers
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700 & Above Employee
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Elasticsearch consultant
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Sep 2019 - Sep 2019
Short but successful project where I migrated Soundcloud's main search engine to the latest Elasticsearch version. This included doing functional changes to several microservices and custom Elasticsearch plugins to deal with deprecations and major changes in ES, upgrading and running tests, devops, fixing the ingestion pipeline, reviewing all the queries, etc. The project was delivered successfully & on time. And my work went live after tests verified everything was as expected. Short but successful project where I migrated Soundcloud's main search engine to the latest Elasticsearch version. This included doing functional changes to several microservices and custom Elasticsearch plugins to deal with deprecations and major changes in ES, upgrading and running tests, devops, fixing the ingestion pipeline, reviewing all the queries, etc. The project was delivered successfully & on time. And my work went live after tests verified everything was as expected.
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Matmatch
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Germany
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Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering
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1 - 100 Employee
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Freelance Consultant
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Sep 2017 - Dec 2017
Support development, design, and product roadmap of the matmatch.com materials search engine, which I helped create in a previous project. Support development, design, and product roadmap of the matmatch.com materials search engine, which I helped create in a previous project.
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BCG Digital Ventures
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Berlin
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Freelance Consultant
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Apr 2017 - Aug 2017
Consulting on a BCG project to implement a search engine and related functionality with Elasticsearch, Java, Spring Boot & Spring Batch. My main responsibility in this project was figuring out the search engine and designing a solution for a complex domain in a very short timeframe while working with the rest of the team to ensure a proper UX for configuring search filters, doing auto complete suggestions, and all the other things that are part of building a good search experience. After completing the project I transitioned out to support the newly created venture for several months to support them and to assist with knowledge transfer to the new CTO and the tech team. Show less
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Localstream
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Berlin
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Co-founder
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Dec 2012 - Dec 2013
Together with co-founder Mark MacMahon, I created Localstream to build a content publishing and discovery platform around the concept of the location graph. To build Localstream, we built a state of the art platform based on elastic search; processed and ingested vast amounts of open geospatial data from open streetmaps, foursquare quatroshapes, yahoo geoplanet, wikipedia, geonames, and others and built the tooling for doing so. We spent much of 2013 expanding our location graph to span the globe, building a responsive javascript application to demo it, and implementing an OAUTH2 API to support that and third party applications. During the second half of 2013 we demoed the application and technology at amongst at Wherecamp Berlin, to various investors, and implemented a Berlin centric local news application using our technology at Media hackday (October 2013). Late 2013, Localstream was acquired by Linko where we are currently busy integrating our technology, technology stack, and development practices to bring the Linko CRM product to market. Show less
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Nokia
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Finland
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Telecommunications
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700 & Above Employee
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Principal Engineer
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Feb 2009 - Nov 2012
- Tech lead for the Ovi Places Registry. Responsible for a complete redesign based on nosql.- Solr based place matching engine.- Integration of Navteq Place assets with Nokia’s local search and places registry.- NoSql, Lucene & Solr, CouchDB, Java, Python, Spring, MySql, Hibernate, REST services- Also used Hadoop, AWS, git, maven, and many other technologies
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Senior member of research staff
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Dec 2005 - Jan 2009
- Senior member of the Smart Space Lab- Indoor location based services - prototyping of server solutions & publishing articles. Services included a friend finder, voucher service, and openid/oauth based authentication & authorization.- ServiceSphere location based services; predecessor of Nokia’s life tools.- Represented Nokia in EU FP7 project Sensei on wireless sensors and actuators- Research on software development in large organizations- Java, Lucene, Python, Django, J2ME, JavaScript, HTML, CSS Show less
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GX Creative Online Development
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Nijmegen, Netherlands
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Release Manager
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Jan 2004 - Nov 2005
- Release Manager for GX WebManager 8.x, a leading CMS product in the Netherlands - Senior software engineer for GX WebManager product + associated search product - Support deployment projects of GX WebManager - Servlets, XSL, JavaScript, Lucene MySql, MS SqlServer, Oracle, Ant, Subversion - Release Manager for GX WebManager 8.x, a leading CMS product in the Netherlands - Senior software engineer for GX WebManager product + associated search product - Support deployment projects of GX WebManager - Servlets, XSL, JavaScript, Lucene MySql, MS SqlServer, Oracle, Ant, Subversion
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University of Groningen
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Netherlands
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Research Services
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700 & Above Employee
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Post Doc Researcher
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Oct 2000 - Dec 2003
- Member of the software engineering and architecture (SEARCH) research group, headed by prof. Jan Bosch - Finalized Ph. D. on “The design and preservation of software systems” - Object oriented frameworks, Software Product lines, Variability Management, Design Erosion - Supervise Ph. D. and Msc. students - Collaborate in EU projects - Case studies at Baan ERP, Thales Naval, Philips Medical and others. - Member of the software engineering and architecture (SEARCH) research group, headed by prof. Jan Bosch - Finalized Ph. D. on “The design and preservation of software systems” - Object oriented frameworks, Software Product lines, Variability Management, Design Erosion - Supervise Ph. D. and Msc. students - Collaborate in EU projects - Case studies at Baan ERP, Thales Naval, Philips Medical and others.
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Blekinge Institute of Technology
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Sweden
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Higher Education
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400 - 500 Employee
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Ph. D student
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Oct 1998 - Sep 2000
- Member of research in software engineering (RISE) headed by prof. Jan Bosch - Licentiate Degree (a Scandinavian degree typically awarded half way through a Ph. D.) - Master thesis on “Design Principles for Reusable, Composable and Extensible Frameworks”. Thesis work was done in Sweden - Member of research in software engineering (RISE) headed by prof. Jan Bosch - Licentiate Degree (a Scandinavian degree typically awarded half way through a Ph. D.) - Master thesis on “Design Principles for Reusable, Composable and Extensible Frameworks”. Thesis work was done in Sweden
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Utrecht University
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Utrecht, Netherlands
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Java Software Engineer
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1997 - 1998
- Misc java engineering work for faculty of Computer and Literature (applets, swing) - Student assistent for first and second year students for java programming course. - Misc java engineering work for faculty of Computer and Literature (applets, swing) - Student assistent for first and second year students for java programming course.
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Education
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2000 - 2003
University of Groningen
Ph. D., Computer Science -
1998 - 2000
Blekinge Institute of Technology
Licentiate, Software Engineering -
1994 - 1999
Utrecht University
Master's degree, Computer Science -
1994 - 1999
Utrecht University
Master's degree, Computer Science -
1994 - 1998
Utrecht University
M. Sc., Computer Science
