Hi!
I'm Auke, a backend engineer based in Utrecht. I work at bol, the largest e-commerce platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. I designed and built three of the shop's core systems: the routing layer that all web traffic passes through, a zero-trust identity system on signed JWTs, and the bot defenses that keep things running during Black Fridays, high-demand product releases, and everything in between. My day-to-day is mostly Go, but I've worked across the stack over the years.
I gravitate towards the broad, messy problems. The ones that cross team boundaries and don't have obvious owners. The bot project cut across four departments. When a major cloud outage hit, I ended up coordinating incident response across the platform because nobody else had the full picture. I like small teams, hard problems, and environments where I can own things end to end. I'm at my best when I can go deep on a problem and ship something that holds up.
Outside of work, I run a homelab, automate everything in my house, and 3D print functional parts that solve problems that didn't exist yet. I make flat whites at home, build side projects when an idea won't leave me alone, and love music with a funky bassline. I travel when I can, usually somewhere with good hiking and a camera in hand. Iceland, Madeira, the Alps.
