Rob van der Linden Vooren

Senior Developer, Solution Architect

About me

I am an independent hands-on software architect with a love for software that delights its users.

I have been delivering business critical software professionally since 2002. In different roles and projects I have experienced practices and processes that support change. Since change is constant, I believe feedback is critical to success on all levels; understanding ultimately software is about people.

I like to think about ways in which systems may break in order to allow them to recover gracefully. I care about delivering systems that can be reasoned about and are expressed in terms of their targeted domain, helping the business move forward. I value quality of work delivered and thrive in an active community with the same drive to grow and learn new things every day.

Aside from brewing software I love to read, fish and ride my motorcycle.

Resumé

Senior Software Engineer, Freelance (2024 aug - 2025 jul, bol.com)
Enhancing Bol.com’s selling offer platform with a focus on conversion-focused services.

With an increasing trend in both traffic and the desire to experiment and innovate, we identified key challenges in conversion-focused services our team had inherited. Aside from making continuous reliability and performance improvements on the existing system, my team worked closely with the product team to re-envision the systems scope to better align with the business goals. This included a focus on auditability, performance, scalability and cost-control.

We translated this into a set of key performance indicators, architectural drivers and design principles to guide our architectural decisions. Seeking fast feedback on the reimagined service while delivering business value, we identified a set of key features to implement in the next quarter. We implemented a proof-of-concept to demonstrate essential ideas to validate our initial approach and set out actionable milestones and tasks.

kotlin golang graphql

Solution Architecture / DevEx, Freelance (2022 sep - 2024 apr, DHL eCommerce NL)
As an initial member of the DevEx team, I applied sentiment analysis to identify areas for improving the developer experience of software teams. Among other things, to aid teams in migrating their existing services to Kubernetes, we documented its layout and how it related to existing infrastructure to enable effective usage. To help teams discover and use available infrastructure, we piloted the Backstage developer portal and promoted standardization around an access management (IAM) solution.

In the second half of my time at DHL, I shifted focus to architecture and joined a small team of fellow architects. As proponents of a collaborative approach to architecture, we engaged stakeholders across the organization and encouraged sharing perspectives to identify challenges, explore options and trade-offs in order to support informed decision-making.

We established an architecture guild to share knowledge across teams and improve understanding of domain and team dependencies. Through facilitated workshops, we clarified organizational and technical challenges, documented business processes and architectural decisions, and fostered a shared understanding of the architecture landscape using tools such as C4 models, user-need mapping, and event storming.

developer experience sociotechnical collaborative software design architecture kubernetes backstage

Senior Software Engineer, Freelance (2020 jul - 2022 jun, bol.com)
Enhancing Bol.com’s selling offer calculation and publication platform.

Aside from working on core platform features in tier 1 services, I played a key role in the transition of the platform to an event driven architecture.
I initiated a first proof of concept with my team to encourage a shift in perspective – from a pipelined architecture for offer processing to an event driven one.

When this shift got momentum across multiple teams in our product, I helped guide my team this transition by hands-on implementing some of the first critical services to adopt the event driven approach. To address testing and maintainability concerns in existing services, I proposed separating business concerns from technical ones in our codebase. The team valued this and embraced this ports-and-adapters architectural style. By incorporating distributed systems design patterns from the start, our services ran reliably and served as a template for future development.

event driven architecture google cloud platform

Staff Software Engineer, (2019 sep - 2020 mar, Uber)
Payments Platform

Lead Software Engineer, Freelance (2018 feb - 2019 sep, Royal FloraHolland)
Building the Floriday platform

As one of the largest auction companies in the world, the Royal Flora Holland moves huge numbers of flowers and plants daily. To facilitate both the buyer and seller side of this movement online, we develop Floriday.

design for distribution of workload and resilience
align on integration approaches across teams
integrate with existing legacy systems to enable ‘strangler’ style software renewal
capture the domain model in close collaboration with domain experts to minimize mental mapping and facilitate future change
we build it we run it

cqrs aws axon framework microservices docker jvm pagerduty grafana sqs

Senior Software Architect (2016 - 2018, doubledutch)
Rewriting the world’s leading Live Engagement Marketing platform

untangling and discovering domains captured in a monolithic codebase which won’t scale much further, to open up for change and extension and compartmentalise in services
teasing out read and write concerns to enable scale when spiky mobile traffic hits our APIs
making services portable through containerisation and deploying them into the cloud
facilitating experimentation through e.g. canaries and dark deploys

legacy ddd microservices cqrs eventsourcing docker jvm golang .net grafana prometheus axon framework rabbitmq

Software Architect / Manager (2011 - 2016, Deloitte Innovation)
“Do the processes in your organization operate according to standard and if not where can you find opportunities to optimize them?”

I performed hands-on technical guidance of the development team in design, implementation and testing of the process intelligence software solution that helps answer these questions. Besides being a core member of our development efforts, I kept an eye on trends in the software field and matched approaches, technology choices and implementations where I believed we could benefit from it.

To this day, the software is in use by several F500 companies to successfully increase operational and process efficiency.

.net etl big data cqrs ddd eventsourcing masstransit monolith microservices

Senior Software Engineer (2003 - 2011, JTeam) _{acquired by Trifork in 2012}
At JTeam I worked on a variety of successful bespoke software projects in different industries and during this period grew into role of Senior Software Engineer. Industries included profit, non-profit, government and healthcare.

I delivered bespoke software systems, often integrating with third-party platforms. I worked both in-house and on client sites, collaborating closely with clients.

Because JTeam nurtured its Extreme Programming culture from inception, I have been ingrained with feedback stimulating practices and methods. I believe I still benefit from these experiences every day.

xp tdd scrum spring framework java hibernate continuous integration

Development Process Consultant (2006, Everyweb Solutions)
Played a key role in setting up a development environment supporting agile practices to increase transparency in the development process. As such introduced issue tracking, an automated build system and test driven development.

spring framework .net trac python tdd continuous integration

Recommendations

“Rob, the man with a sharp eye for holistic views and deep technical knowledge. He is strong in distributed system design and knows how to tackle complex business challenges with simple and effective software solutions. Rob shines in growing software guided by tests and a razor sharp design. This allowed our team to be effective, and to stay effective on the long term. It is a bliss to work with Rob and I’m looking forward to work with him any time.”

Pieter Joost van de Sande

–

“Rob is a dedicated and driven software engineer with a keen eye for detail and workflow. Highly recommended.”

Olivier Keun

Education

Building Software Architectures, Hands-On (Neal Ford, 3 days)
Advanced Distributed Systems Design Course (Udi Dahan, 5 days)
Distributed Domain Driven Design, CQRS (Greg Young, 2 days)
Bachelor of ICT, Software & Business Engineering (University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam)

Contact

Contact me to inquire for my next availability.

rob@softwarebrewery.nl
@robvdlv
KvK 69654050
VAT-ID NL002135970B94
Utrecht Area, The Netherlands
Terms & Conditions (Dutch)