# Daniël Koek

- Residence: Bandon, Co. Cork, Ireland
- Email: <contact@danielkoek.net>
- Phone: 0830981800
- Nationality: Dutch
- Birthday: 21-12-1994
- Driver licence: Full Irish

## Skills (in years)

- C# .NET/ ASP.NET: 9
- Front-End Technologies: 10
- Azure Devops: 8
- .Net Core: 8
- Docker: 8
- Kubernetes: 8

## Skill Set

As a full stack developer, I have extensive experience in both back-end and
front-end technologies. This allows me to adapt and balance these fields
effectively. Additionally, I have significant infrastructure (as code)
expertise, enabling me to transform concepts into fully live applications.

### Knowledge Front-End

- LIT
- Cloudflare workers (serverless)
- TailwindCSS
- NPM/NodeJs - both use and maintain
- JavaScript - any ECMA version
- Web workers
- Web-Components
- React/Remix
- Angular (incl. SSR)
- VueJS

### Knowledge Back-End

- C#/.NET - including .NET Core
- Entity Framework
- Elasticsearch
- Various message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus)
- Rest API, Middleware
- Microservices and Monoliths
- Git
- Kubernetes (incl. custom controllers/CRDs)

### Knowledge DevOps

- ELK/Logging systems
- PostgreSQL, MySQL
- Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions
- Azure (AKS, Service Bus, Front Door, Key Vault)
- Infrastructure as Code (Bicep, Helm)
- Docker
- OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana
- Serverless architectures

## Work Experience

### Introduction

I am a full stack developer with C# at the core and close to a decade of
experience across the three layers that make software actually ship: front
end, back end and the infrastructure underneath. I have deliberately worked
in many different industries and company structures, which taught me the ups
and downs of most technology stacks — and how to pick the right one for the
job, rather than the fashionable one. I am highly adaptable and quick to find
my way in an existing codebase. The things that I strive for:

- **FrontEnd:** HTML/CSS/JS started as a means to get a button to do
  something in the back end, but I quickly learned that good UI is what makes
  data useful — and often harder to get right than the backend. A CRUD is
  easy; the fun challenge is presenting complex concepts so a user
  understands them without needing to understand the system. I have in-depth
  vanilla JavaScript experience (including fun side projects built without
  any framework), which makes any framework easy to pick up
- **BackEnd:** Deep understanding of C#, keeping up with the latest language
  versions. I write code that the next person immediately understands, using
  a minimal set of essential, well-maintained NuGet packages. I understand
  most other languages — C/C++, VB, Java, Python — just enough to convert
  them to C#!
- **Infrastructure & DevOps:** Kubernetes, Docker, Helm and infrastructure as
  code, with strong CI/CD pipelines that keep deployments boring, reliable
  and the development cycle short
- **Solution architecture:** Hands-on experience with monoliths,
  microservices and serverless — and, more importantly, knowing which one the
  business actually needs. Always with security and observability in mind
- **Maintainability:** Readable code that stays optimised for speed and
  reliability. I quickly understand existing code and add features that fit
  the narrative of what is already there, backed by Domain Driven Design and
  solid testing principles
- **Delivery:** Iterative, feedback-driven delivery — small previews early,
  unit tested from the start, shipped often

### Uniphar (Private LTD, Greenfields-Innovation) (Remote)

- Period: February 2025 – Present
- Branch: Warehouse management
- Title: Full stack developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (AzureDevops)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, AKS, Docker, Azure Service Bus, Azure Front Door, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, Azure Data Explorer
- Languages: C#, bicep
- Frameworks: Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Entity Framework

At Uniphar I work in the Platform Engineering team. Together we build and
maintain the shared services that every other product team depends on to move
data and files reliably through the organisation. Rather than owning a single
product, we look after a whole set of platform components — a Kubernetes
ingress controller, a message broker monitoring platform, a Teams
notification API, and FrontGate, the company's file onboarding and processing
solution — and I move between them wherever I am needed most. Across all of
these the focus is the same: reliable, observable services on modern .NET
(currently .NET 10) running on AKS, with a strong emphasis on OpenTelemetry
so issues surface before they become incidents.

The main tasks I had at Uniphar were:

- Contributing to FrontGate, the company's onboarding and file processing
  solution, adding new ingestion connectors, fixing production issues and
  migrating its Kubernetes ingress handling onto a custom AbstractIngress CRD
- Building and maintaining the message broker monitoring platform, which
  watches Azure Service Bus queues and Logic Apps/Integration Suite for
  failures and surfaces them proactively in Teams
- Developing the Teams Notifications API, which provisions Teams apps and
  posts interactive cards (reprocess/view-file actions) back into channels
- Working on IngressProcessor, the AKS controller that injects Kubernetes
  ingress configuration into Azure Front Door, including designing the
  AbstractIngress CRD now shared across other platform services
- Building a ServiceNow integration API for creating and managing incidents,
  and a SAP event ingestion service that sinks events into Azure Data Explorer
- Contributing to shared platform building blocks: the
  Uniphar.Platform.Telemetry NuGet package, the Document API, DotFlyer
  (SMS/email sending) and the pod notes controller used for AKS image cleanup
- Rolling out OpenTelemetry, health probes and shared CI/CD workflow
  conventions across these services, and tightening workflow permissions as
  part of a broader security hardening effort

### Kiwa (Freelance) (Remote)

- Period: December 2023 – January 2025
- Branch: Certification of meat(pigs)
- Title: Full stack developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (AzureDevops)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, Entity framework, .net framework, .net core,
- Languages: C#, jQuery
- Frameworks: EF & Kendo

Kiwa asked me back — not for the project I was originally hired for, but to
give some of their internal systems the TLC they needed. Alongside day-to-day
maintenance and new features, I drove a migration from .NET Framework to .NET
Core: with minimal effort I removed the dependencies that were blocking the
switch and successfully migrated the application. Because I learn a new
system inside out very quickly, I also became the go-to person for a number
of older applications nobody in the company had knowledge of anymore, and I
wrote the documentation that was missing.

The main tasks I had at Kiwa were:

- Maintaining and extending the internal line-of-business applications
- Fixing bugs, building new features and finding bugs before users did
- Cleaning up legacy code, upgrading projects and designing upgrade paths
  (.NET Framework to .NET Core)
- Helping build an invoice proposal system
- Reverse-engineering undocumented systems and making them maintainable again

### Vicrea (Contract) (Remote)

- Period: September 2022 – December 2023
- Branch: Geometry management for local governments
- Title: Solution architect/Full stack developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (AzureDevops)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, K8s, Docker, Cloudflare, PostgreSQL
- Languages: C#, TypeScript
- Frameworks: EF, Remix, React, Kendo, GRPC, serverless, IdentityServer4, GeoServer

When I joined Vicrea, the application was a proof of concept running on local
Portainer instances, with little consideration for reliability, security or
isolation of business logic. My main task was to get a production-ready
application launched. Leveraging my years of experience across software
stacks, I turned it into a cloud-native application with the observability
you would expect of any modern system. Along the way we removed every manual
step — new customer environments are provisioned fully automatically — and
made sure the application could handle large amounts of geo-data without
incurring a large cost to the company.

The main tasks I had at Vicrea were:

- Creating CI/CD pipelines to automatically deploy new versions of
  microservices (leveraging helm)
- Isolating the FE from the BE and deploying this using Cloudflare workers in
  order to have a serverless global low latency way to serve HTML/CSS/JS
- Building logic so that part of the FE was only available for authenticated
  users
- Automatically using infrastructure as code to provision new environments,
  including databases, docker registries and k8s clusters
- Refactoring major parts of the existing code to be compliant with Domain
  Driven Design concepts
- Creating background processes that would pull large datasets from various
  government agencies. This was then redistributed to various internal APIs,
  which in turn would provide insights for users
- Removing FE-microservices and creating a mono FE, refactored from single-spa
  to Remix, introducing Tailwind and moving from Leaflet to OpenLayers
- Mentoring/teaching other developers in kubernetes and how to develop
  decoupled software

### Kiwa (through TeamRockstar) (Apeldoorn, The Netherlands)

- Period: June 2020 – September 2022
- Branch: Manure management
- Title: Full stack .net core developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum/Kanban (AzureDevops)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, K8s, Docker, Cloudflare, Kafka, ElasticSearch
- Languages: C#, TailwindCSS, JavaScript, Yaml, Soap
- Frameworks: AutoMapper, Entity framework, Microservices, pub-sub, Kafka, Tailwind, Web-Components, Lit, Snowpack, Cloudflare, ES, HTTPS, Agro Tunnel, OAuth 2.0

Kiwa tasked us with building a proxy-type application to collect and process
data for the manure industry. The system had to be asynchronous, reliable,
secure and highly flexible, so we chose containers and Kubernetes — and since
I had previous experience there, I designed and set up the foundation of the
system. We picked Kafka as the pub-sub backbone for its reliability and
Elasticsearch for logging, and built an API-driven front end using utility
CSS and Web Components to keep that side just as flexible and scalable. We
even built our own OAuth server due to the constraints presented to us. It
was the first time I built everything from scratch, and the project proved
that 'new' technologies are not just worth it — they are highly flexible and
maintainable when done right.

The main tasks I had at Kiwa were:

- Designing, building and implementing the infrastructure from scratch
- Introducing container technologies to a company that still ran servers on
  bare metal and had no prior history with Docker
- Building backend services (with full CI/CD) to process SOAP, XML and SFTP,
  exposed through RESTful APIs for a very flexible way to insert and collect
  data
- Creating a dynamic, data-driven front end — table-heavy screens that had to
  stay readable, responsive and flexible for future changes
- Creating a full OAuth flow with multiple login systems and roles
  maintainable from the front end, including a "Permission Module" uniquely
  developed for the agriculture market but customisable for future portals
- Improving security end to end: Cloudflare Tunnels, E2E HTTPS traffic and a
  zero-trust security plan with higher standards than any company I had
  encountered before

### Univé (through TeamRockstar) (Zwolle, The Netherlands)

- Period: August 2019 – May 2020
- Branch: Insurances
- Title: Front end Web Developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (Jira)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, K8s, Docker, Nginx
- Languages: HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS
- Frameworks: Tailwind, UtilityCSS, LitElement, LitHTML, Snowpack, NPM, jQuery, SASS, Web-Components, Storybook, WebPack, Karma, Visual Testing

When I started at Univé, a lot of older techniques were still in use — jQuery
among them — which, combined with hard-to-read code, slowed every developer
down. I introduced Web Components (LitElement) together with Tailwind's
utility-based CSS, which made the team quicker and more productive without
changing too much of the existing workflow, while dramatically shrinking both
the JavaScript and CSS on new components. To make it all easier to manage I
also brought in Karma for unit testing and Storybook as a component library,
so UX could review components at an earlier stage and we all had a better
view of what lived where. Together this let us build a more powerful user
experience while keeping a consistent look and feel.

The main tasks I had at Univé were:

- Maintaining unive.nl and its logged-in environment
- Introducing new technologies tailored to the product and bringing them to
  production (Tailwind, LitElement)
- Maintaining and improving build and release pipelines for quicker builds
  and better stability
- Building new features that still gave a rich user experience despite
  limited availability of surrounding systems — finding creative solutions
  rather than being limited by systems outside our control
- Being a helping hand for other team members when they got stuck building
  new or improving existing code

### RTL (through TeamRockstar) (Hilversum, The Netherlands)

- Period: February 2019 – June 2019
- Branch: Media
- Title: Team lead/Full stack .Net core developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (Jira)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, K8s, Docker
- DB/DC: Nifi
- Languages/Tools: .net core 2.2/K8s/Docker/MassTransit/RabbitMQ

RTL has loads of systems that need to communicate with each other. We built a
data hub that funnels a few source systems into multiple target systems,
reducing load and making it possible to integrate legacy systems with the
newer platforms RTL acquired. The data ultimately serves as metadata for
platforms like RTL XL and Videoland.

The main tasks I had at RTL were:

- Receiving and adapting data from the source systems
- Creating distributors that fan the data out to four target systems, each
  tailored to that system's needs
- Building the CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps and setting up Azure resources
- Guiding the team as team lead: introducing Kanban and gathering business
  requirements from the product owners

### MyDataFactory (through TeamRockstar) (Meppel, The Netherlands)

- Period: October 2018 – February 2019
- Branch: Matching Data
- Title: Full stack C#/Angular developer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (Jira)
- Systems Used: Azure DevOps, K8s, Docker
- DB/DC: ElasticSearch & MySql
- Languages/Tools: .net Core 2.2/C#/TypeScript/html5/Angular/npm

MyDataFactory is a company that specialises in building matching engines for
customers that have invoices coming in from different sources and that want to
match this to their own in-house catalogue of products. Through the process of
manual and automated tagging of potential products, the user can decide what
products with what items on the bill, after which the system will improve
itself to remove further human intervention.

The main tasks I had at MyDataFactory were:

- Building the front end where matches are suggested, approved and — after
  processing — downloaded for other systems
- Building and deploying a proof of concept moving the entire infrastructure
  to Kubernetes as infrastructure-as-code, automated with Helm
- Consolidating the existing tag structure into a single system with deep-dive
  tests to guarantee tag behaviour now and in the future
- Migrating Azure Functions to Kubernetes pods consuming from Kafka, which
  improved performance significantly, with results stored in Elasticsearch

### PFM-Intelligence (through TeamRockstar) (Alphen aan den rijn, The Netherlands)

- Period: June 2018 – September 2018
- Branch: Footfall
- Title: Full stack C#, Angular Engineer
- Methods & Techniques: Scrum (Jira)
- Systems Used: AWS Serverless lambda, S3
- DB/DC: PostgreSQL
- Languages/Tools: .net Core 2.1, C#, Typescript, html5, Angular, npm, yarn

PFM creates reporting, data repair and data collection software to measure
footfall (visitors). The old stack had to be phased out, so together with the
development team I rebuilt its functionality in .NET Core and Angular — with
many improvements and optimisations, partly by improving the data flow and
partly by cutting cost through serverless approaches like AWS Lambda.

The main tasks I had at PFM were:

- Building new front end functionality and refactoring existing Angular code
- Creating Lambdas that consume Kinesis events from field sensors, parsing,
  processing and validating the data before storage

### TransUnion, TrustEv (Cork, Ireland)

- Period: March 2017 - June 2018
- Branch: Anti-Fraud
- Title: Full stack C# Engineer
- Methods & Techniques: SaFe/Kanban (Scrum)
- Operating systems: Windows 10/Cent OS(servers)
- DB/DC: ElasticSearch, Hive, HDFS, Logstash, Curator, Hadoop, Kafka
- Languages/Tools: Microsoft Orleans, Web Api, C#, JavaScript, html5, Java, Python

We built a fact/score-based fraud prevention system that determines whether a
transaction sent by a customer belongs to a legitimate person: let the good
guys in, make it very hard for the bad guys, using aggregation over big data
sets to identify users based on their history.

The main tasks I had at TransUnion were:

- Integrating third-party data sources (XML, SOAP, JSON and custom formats)
  for better fact results
- Extending the existing APIs and surfacing them in a VueJS demo application
- Creating test and mock systems for better QA automation
- Improving delivery pipelines to speed up releases and remove manual steps
- Building custom NiFi processors for handling data streams
- Taking part in the on-call rota for outages, remotely diagnosing why
  systems went down or consumed excessive resources

### Triton Software (Cork, Ireland)

- Period: November 2016 - February 2017
- Title: PHP developer

Full stack development on a medical record system used by nearly all cruise
ships. Strictly monitored by coast guards: no record can ever be deleted and
everything follows comprehensive guidelines. Worked directly with clients on
issues and new enhancements.

### Apple (Cork, Ireland)

- Period: May 2016 – November 2016
- Title: QA, Localisation Tester

Testing Apple software products, raising bug tickets and language proofing
Dutch translations.

### Ordina (Nieuwegein, The Netherlands)

- Period: September 2015 – May 2016
- Title: Software Engineer

Rapid prototyping consultant, building experimental prototypes for third-party
clients: a model taxi parking system for KLM at Schiphol, a gamified Apple
Watch health app for Interpolis, and an offline-capable evacuation app for
ProRail (Dutch railroad infrastructure).

## Education

- College of Amsterdam — BSc. Technical Software Engineering (2012 - 2015)
- Nova College — MBO Software development level. 4 (2010 - 2012)
- VLC college — HAVO-3 (2007 - 2010)

## Languages

- Dutch: mother language
- English: spoken: excellent; writing: excellent

## Competencies

- Mentoring — taught teams Kubernetes and decoupled software design
- Fast onboarding — repeatedly became the go-to person on undocumented legacy
  systems
- Pragmatic modernisation — new technologies into production without
  disrupting existing workflows
- Ownership — on-call experience, production debugging and security hardening

## Beyond the code

- Road cycling with my local club — nothing builds team spirit like a shared
  headwind
- Growing our own vegetables on the allotment
- Tinkering with electronics: small LoRa, ESP32 and nRF52 side projects