Resume

Rick van Lieshout

I'm a passionate CTO who bifurcates his love between great software development and leading others in their continuous improvement journeys

Skills & Technologies

The list below is far from complete and unordered but focuses on the skills & technologies I value the most.

• Leadership & Team management
• Teaching, coaching & presenting
• Agile development
• Docker, Kubernetes & CI/CD
• Event-based architecture
• Reactive architecture
• Modular monolith to microservices architectures
• AI Tooling - Claude, Codex, OpenAI, Skillful, etc.
• Typescript (Javascript)
• .NET (core)
• React, Angular
• Linux & Shell scripting
• NoSQL (Mongo, Postgre)
• SQL (Postgre, sqlite, mariadb)
• Elasticsearch & Kibana
• Kafka / RabbitMQ

Work experience

Open-source aficionado Always

A fair share of my private work is done through open-source media. I don’t have a portfolio but I have a Github where I share most things. If you’re interested in what else I do, or why, let me know and I’ll share a detailed description.

CTO at Frontliners (INFORIT) 2016 - Now

At Frontliners I am responsible for the entire technical architecture of the new TFX stack that I launched shortly after 2018. This involves setting up and maintaining a modern event-based microservice architecture on a Kubernetes-based SaaS cloud solution and migrating to modern programming languages and platforms such as dotnetcore, Supabase and React. All while also ensuring security by baking it into the design, pentesting on rotation and managing an ISO 27001 certification.

We’ve delivered a few smaller pieces of software but mainly focus on building a next-gen Transport Management System called TFX which is being rolled out worldwide in feature phases for the Royal Den Hartogh Organisation.

The other main responsibility I have is creating and maintaining, a coherent team of (lead) engineers by sharing knowledge, making decisions, and empowering them to explore technologies outside of their comfort zone. This includes everything from platform to e2e engineering. During my time at Frontliners, the company has grown from 5-7 in-house developers on a single product to 30+ engineers on multiple projects.

The teams I manage will be listed below. Some of the core concepts they work with will also be listed. Apart from the last two I also play an active role in them:

• 3 Full-fledged (6-8 people) Scrum development teams working on the latest product.
  • day-to-day management of people done by “Chapter leads”
  • React, Docker, .NET (core), Mongo, Kafka, DDD, CQRS
• Business Integration team (Supabase, Kysely, PostgreSQL)
  • Initial architecture, db-first to function first mindset, hiring senior to lead the team.
  • Business goal: Upskilling 2 “legacy” engineers into modern typescript based tooling
• Platform team (Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, CI/CD pipelines, Vault, Keycloak, etc…)
• Legacy team (ASP.NET, MSSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch)
• Legacy team (Clarion, SQL-Sybase)

Research & Applied Machine Learning (side initiative) 2019

Alongside my role as CTO, I contributed to a research initiative focused on antisense oligonucleotide therapy. The work involved applying machine learning and data-analysis techniques to biological datasets, exploring predictive modelling and sequence-related analysis using Python and Scala.

The project was conducted in collaboration with external researchers and focused on investigating how modern AI/ML techniques could support future developments in antisense therapy and bioinformatics-related research.

Solidwinds developer 2015 - 2016

Set up an architecture and started implementation for a scalable metrics collection system for windmill location scouting.

This involved collecting data from windmill sensor towers on old IOT-scale equipment, aggregating the results to prove that the chosen location was profitable and sustainable enough to place a proper windmill.

Hanflex employee September 2015 - July 2018

I started working for the HAN (hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen) in 2015. The HAN offers us different jobs (teaching others, open door days, etc) and we are free to reply and take those. I primarily respond to the open-door days and the teaching jobs. On the open-door days, I usually worked with 3d printers, IOT devices, and a laser cutter.

Teaching positions I took were mostly for basic development tooling (Java, .Net, PostgreSQL) and I taught a few classes of English (goal: working proficiency).

The “mi-soft.nl” era 2006 - January 2019

I started my own “company” helping people with their PC issues. This ranged from fixing the hardware & software of home computers, installing home & corporate networks to developing software and websites.

The software and websites are still being maintained to date or have been handed over to external parties.

Education

HBO ICT / software engineering HAN - Nijmegen 2014 - 2018

I enrolled in college to obtain my software engineering degree. I finished my first year with an average of 8.3/10 and graduated in 2018 with an average of 8/10 again.

Bilingual Senior General Secondary Education - Maaslandcollege Oss 2005 - 2010

Graduate internship at VAA ICT Consultancy February 2018 - June 2018

Building an interactive and fully customizable dashboard on top of VAA’s existing product lineup. The dashboard was built with ReactJS backed by an Express back-end-for-front-end.

The dashboard itself enabled detailed insight into the vastly complex agriculture world customizable by and for each of VAA’s customers.

Training

I’ll list some of the training courses I’ve had whilst working. Some of these have (official) certificates, some don’t, but all have brought value and knowledge.

• Domain Driven Design Vijfhart
• Young Executive Program (YEP) - De Baak
• Hiring & interview training (icm.nl)
• Conversation techniques & de-escalation (TIJDwinst.com).
• Kubernetes (NobleProg Certification Kubernetes on Azure (AKS), 26 August 2019 - 27 August 2019)
• SEEBURGER b2b integration

Projects

Burgerszoo interactive scouting expedition November 2017 - January 2018

For a zoo in the Netherlands me and a couple of fellow students designed, built, and tested an interactive scouting expedition. The expedition consisted of 6 NFC scanning points that play facts when scanned, it was fully configurable by the staff thanks to an interactive web interface made with ReactJS.

han4pi September 2015 - July 2018

Designing and building a learning module for elementary school students. All of the code is available on Github.

Quintor bulk-mail April 2016 - June 2016

SCRUM project to build a bulk mail system for QUINTOR customers/affiliates to decrease the workload on the administrative team.