Axel Smeets - a creative and autonomous software engineer
About me
I have several years of professional experience as a consultant in greenfield projects, R&D roles, and software engineering teams where I bring a startup mindset, meaning I comfortably wear many hats to ship timely and to-the-point solutions for problems which should be solved by computer systems.
I first got into programming at the age of 12 when I when I joined a community that made custom maps for Warcraft 3. The once pure and naive interest has since spiraled out of control into an not-quite-yet all-consuming passion for everything computer.
Outside of work, I enjoy tinkering with game engines, compilers, and a deep dives à la blub studies. Aside from everything computer, I have a great passion for diving & underwater photography (☠️) and small-scale, "it's honest work" homebrewing, as well as a bit of espresso tinkering.
Technical Skills
Experience
At Lingio I help ship an engaging and pragmatic EdTech product which provides a cost-effective and proven solution for employees of all skill levels to learn and grow. Sometimes it means (re)evaluating the practical merit of a feature, and sometimes going back to the drawing board, but mostly it's about getting shit done: solve real problems, ship minimums, observe and iterate.
- Datacenters still fall in and out of favor.
- Revisit earlier decisions and decide whether it's time to re-architect or to do a "fulhack"/quick fix.
- Owning a data-simulation project for more juicy Sales demos.
- Conducting our yearly security audits directly with the CTO.
- Still managing our cloud infrastructure (kubernetes, VMs with docker-compose, DNS).
During my first years at Lingio my primary contributions were developing and shipping an indexable, codegen-driven, redis-fronted and S3-backed storage solution seamlessly and without any downtime; migrating backend systems to new datacenters/providers; and improving the developer feedback loop (chat webhooks, CI/CD workflows, local tooling).
- Migrate backend systems to new datacenters without downtime.
- Engaging in cross-team coordination to design and ship features and fixes.
- Implementing data & domain-oriented API design while respecting (restful) http semantics.
- Researching and authoring our internal development practices with Google Spanner.
- Identifying and fixing developer pain-points; from CI/CD warts to establishing code-reuse patterns in a common lib
- Leading observability effort, from threading it through our codebase to setting up Grafana dashboards and alerts, using OpenTelemetry.
- Design & implementation of a content-addressable audio synthesis architecture.
- Prototype-to-rollout of a cache layer using codegen to achieve performant typesafety in Go.
- Managing our cloud infrastructure (kubernetes, VMs with docker-compose, DNS).
I joined the small consultancy team at ON-IQ to do exciting work: greenfield projects, research prototypes, real-world rollouts. Developing cost-effective, roboust and performant solutions to founders who never had the venture capital of silicon valley fame-but just enough to keep at it.
- Small team, significant individual responsibility, in direct contact with clients.
- Optimized data collection processes by 10X through offline preprocessing and "smart" caching.
- Led migration of several systems to containers & Kubernetes.
- Built apps for Android and iOS with React-Native using Expo.
- Designed and implemented a distributed system for both video-on-demand and livestreaming of thousands of video streams.
- Co-designed, implemented and installed a system for on-premise, anonymized video processing based on EdgeTPU with an accompanying web UI in Mithril. From riced grub, to debootstrap to admin portal.
- Design, development, and management of software projects.
- Apps for Android & iOS with shared codebase.
- Backends for apps and admin portals.
While I also worked as a lab assistant, most of my time as an amanuens was spent developing an internal web system for categorizing and visualizing software research papers using an established taxonomy. Software researchers would input and categorize research papers, allowing other researchers, practicioners and others to search this database for interventions to their problems.
- First encounter with an graph database (Neo4J, which is developed just 10 min away in Malmö)
- Web service in Java using an opinionated framework (similar to express.js)
- Modular frontend codebase; some using jquery, a few in react, most using bad old javascript
Education
- Specialization: Software Engineering (MSc.)
- Co-organized a "Wargame" with security researchers from Ericsson.