About me
Hello there, my name is Jochum (pronunciation) van der Ploeg, also known on the internet as wolfenra.in.
As a human[citation needed] being who loves Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering and many other fantasy related subjects I am often considered a geek or a nerd. To make matters worse, I also love to tinker and mess with things that I probably should not touch… but it does complete the stereotype.
When I’m not playing make believe or hacking and slashing in someone else’s code, I also conquer professional challenges. Working on those I consider myself as someone who thinks outside the box and I challenge myself to grow whenever the opportunity allows for it.
One type of challenge that I like to give myself is to work on open source projects, this allows me to learn new aspects of programming and gives me the opportunity to grow into a community.
Even though I love working on open source projects, I find the most interesting challenges in game development. I love to make use of experimental rendering techniques and I often read up on the ins and outs of any interesting technique I’ve found before I go to bed.
These interests of mine are intertwined with my core strengths:
- I am analytical.
- I am constructive.
- I am dedicated.
- I am open to learn and adapt.
I am an advocate of open source software, and when a person or a company ask my opinion about it I always say the same thing:
You should give back to the open source community by either contributing, interacting with the community or open source your own projects. You will benefit from it in the long run.
Work Experience
App development consultancy company that designs and build Flutter applications.
Working as an open source engineer, maintaining open source packages from Very Good Ventures and packages that they use interally.
- Maintaining existing open source packages either from Very Good Ventures or external ones. Including triaging issues, bug fixes, feature implementations and improving documentation.
- Writing blog posts and speak at events about various open source projects and toolings.
- Represent Very Good Venture at meetups and conferences.
Startup company focused on video call solutions for the healthcare sector.
Working as a senior engineer and as a team lead for a team of six. Keeping close communication with both the product owner and the stakeholders of different projects.
- Building custom made solutions for customers that integrate with the Mobiléa platform.
- Maintaining the open source Flutter plugins twilio_programmable_video and twilio_programmable_chat.
- Leading a small team on multiple internal projects.
- Providing technical guidance for multiple internal projects.
- Fulfilling the role of Scrum Master.
Freelancing for multiple companies, building custom-made websites and systems. Together with Kyzoe Hosting & Design.
Projects include:- Created a server monitoring tool for CentOS servers.
Education
Windesheim - Zwolle, Netherlands
- Major: Software engineering
- Minor: Data science
- Part-time study
- Expected graduation date: August 2022
Friesland College - Heerenveen - Netherlands
- Graduated: July 2018
Open source
Maintaining and developing packages for Flutter under the Blue Fire organization.
Projects include:- Flame Engine, a 2D game engine built on top of Flutter.
- Oxygen, an ECS framework for the Dart language.
- And many more, see the link above for all the projects.
- Developing and maintaining the sourcecode.
- Handling bug reports and feature requests.
- Reviewing pull requests from contributors.
- Manage the Discord community.
Maintaining and developing Flutter plugins for the Twilio Programmable Video and the Twilio Programmable Chat SDKs.
Projects include:- twilio_programmable_video, brings the Programmable Video SDK to Flutter.
- twilio_conversations, brings the Conversations SDK to Flutter. Currently under development.
- Developing and maintaining the sourcecode.
- Handling bug reports and feature requests.
- Reviewing merge requests from contributors.
- Keep close contact with Twilio for ease of communication.
A personal experimental pet project that adds multi window support to Flutter on Desktop.
Technologies used: C++, GTK and Swift.Small but not insignificant projects
- Binarize is a package for the Dart language that wraps the ByteData functionality into a more streamlined and extendable payload system.
- Flavor Text is a lightweight and fully customisable text parser for Flutter.
- Benchmark provides a standard way of writing and running benchmarks for the Dart language.
- dart-raylib is a Dart package that brings bindings for raylib to Dart.
Skillset
- Highly proficient with: Dart, TypeScript, JavaScript
- Proficient with: Kotlin, Swift, Java, C#
- Familiar with: Objective-C, POSIX Shell Command Language, C++
- Git
- GitLab CI/CD
- Docker
- Game development
Languages
| Language | Skill level |
|---|---|
| English | C1 |
| Dutch | Native |
| Frisian | Native |
Random facts about me
- I own a working Commodore 64 that is older than I am.
- I accidentally started a rubber duck collection.
- I have a growing collection of unique and strange Linux devices.