Digital Power Tools

Leysir — OwnerMay 2021 - Now

Leysir is my side hustle where I create and sell items that I manufacture with my Flux laser cutter. The products I'm selling range from personalized flower hoops over templates for leather manufacturing to bespoke engraving and cutting jobs.
This side hustle allows me to learn non-engineering skills, like sales and marketing, that make a business work.

Oqton — Principal Software EngineerMarch 2020—August 2024

Oqton is a Manufacturing Operating System, initially focussed on multiple manufacturing techniques, but later on focussing on 3D Printing and CNC. The customers upload their 3D model files to the platform, which heals them, slices, and nests them together on a build plate in preparation for 3D printing. In late 2021, Oqton was acquired by 3D Systems.

Backend

In the first half of my time at Oqton, I was part of the backend team. We managed the systems behind the scenes, including a database layer, an event system, and a system to run asynchronous AI-based tasks. Together with the infrastructure team, we were the first line within the engineering team to handle system slowdowns and outages.

Integrations

As the Oqton product usage grew, so did the requirement for integrations with other software systems. Gradually, I moved teams from the backend functionality to the software integrations, working with the customers and their technology partners to determine requirements and getting the integrations implemented.

Showpad — Senior Software EngineerMay 2018—February 2020

Showpad provides a platform where marketing and revenue teams come together to empower sellers with content and training to engage buyers — and to add meaningful value during every interaction. During my time at Showpad, I worked on two integration projects.

Salesforce, MS Dynamics & SAP

When I joined Showpad, the product had an integration to pull contact information from Salesforce. The same integration was reimplemented in the web application and in the mobile applications for Android and iOS. The product team reworked the vision for this integration to work in a uniform way across platforms and with multiple CRM systems. The team I worked with got to work on the backend service that unified and generalized the integration touchpoints to communicate with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and SAP. Instead of communicating directly with the CRM systems, the web application and mobile applications communicated with this unified service, guaranteeing uniform functionality and improved security.

Google Slides

The second project I worked on at Showpad was the integration with Google Slides. We built an integration that could pull (updates to) marketing presentations from Google Slides into Showpad, so they could be used within Showpad for sales communication. The edit functionality allowed sales people to tailor the marketing material to their particular prospect and have the updated materials synced and available in Showpad in just a second.

Mollom / Acquia — Software EngineerSeptember 2011—April 2018

Mollom is an (now defunct) automatic content moderation tool for the Drupal ecosystem that Acquia acquired in 2012. As Mollom matured as a product, my time shifted to a new personalization platform called Acquia Lift (now called Acquia Personalization). Acquia Lift aimed to tailor the contents of a Drupal website to the individual website visitors based on their earlier visiting patterns.

Mollom

Mollom was an API-first product to protect Drupal sites against comment spam. As we were a small team, I worked on all backend-related tasks, from the API implementation and tuning the machine learning models for new spam patterns to data storage, deployments, and on-call rotations.

Acquia Lift

After Mollom was acquired by Acquia and in a stable state, the team's focus shifted to a new website personalization product, Acquia Lift, born out of the winning entry of an internal hackathon. For Acquia Lift, I worked on the backend service that, given the ID of a section on a site, recommends the best content to show to the visitor based on their previously viewed pages. Together with the Drupal module team and the data collection team, we worked through multiple iterations to take it from hackathon proof of concept to a proper product that satisfies the customers' needs.