Tom Broerse

Background

I’m a full stack web developer who’s enjoyed building web applications for more than 10 years. I have a strong interest in user experience design and software architecture, I am passsionate about open source software and take pride in producing clean code. I enjoy learning and using new technologies.

Technical Skills

Extensive knowledge of Javascript, Perl, PostgreSQL, Linux, Git, CSS/HTML, PHP, TDD
Thorough grasp of Python (Django), Ruby (Rails), Bash, Sass, MySQL, MongoDB, JQuery, Cloud environments
Familiar with Go, Docker, Elastic Search, Redis, Puppet, Java, C++, Selenium, Jenkins, Varnish

Work Experience

Technical Lead

99designs - May 2014 to present

99designs is the world’s largest online graphic design marketplace, connecting businesses with more than 300.000 designers from around the world. I am currently leading the customer acquisition team, which focuses on building the tools to grow our customer base.

Led the development of Gift Shop, a new product initiative that allows customers to preview and order their designs printed on various merchandise.
Designed, implemented and analysed numerous A/B tests focused on improving avarage spend per customer, resulting in an increase of over 10%.
Manage, scale and troubleshoot our Amazon Web Services based infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

Senior Developer

99designs - Jul 2013 to Apr 2014

Developed a global site-wide navigation service that’s used by various parts of 99designs’ Service Oriented Architecture, to serve consistent headers, footers and off-canvas navigation on over a million pages each day.
Developed a tool to create, manage and serve responsive landing pages using PHP Symfony Forms and MongoDB.

Software Development Team Leader

Infoxchange Australia - 2010 to 2013

I managed a team of 6-8 software engineers and provided technical leadership over the development and maintenance of a range of online applications used by thousands of health and community sector agencies every day. The position required involvement in all parts of the development process, from project management and UX design to software architecture and simply “cutting code”. During my time as team leader I’ve transformed software development at Infoxchange:

Introduced agile development methodology including Kanban, daily stand-ups, user stories and burn-down charts, significantly improving visibility and communication within and around the team.
Introduced peer reviews, rigorous automated testing and continuous integration, significantly improving code stability and release frequency across a range of products.
Oversaw a major overhaul and refactoring of large legacy applications written in Perl. Re-developing from scratch using Python/Django where appropriate and morphing others into modern Perl MVC applications. (DBIx::Class, Mojolicious, PSGI).
Significantly changed the developer recruitment process. Requiring job candidates to write code and spend time with the team before joining.
Enhanced and modernized the toolset for developers. Git instead of CVS for source control. Redmine for project management and issue tracking. VMWare to simplify mimicking of and experimenting with complex server environments.

Web Developer

Infoxchange Australia - 2006 to 2010

Designed and developed various enhancements to Infoxchange’s eReferral and eWaitlist systems. Including SOAP-based integration with third party electronic health systems, A reporting module, a Case Management module, Client Merge functionality.
Re-developed large parts of front-end code (JavasScript) used across dozens of Infoxchange sites and applications, replacing legacy custom-written libraries by well organised, well-documented code based on YUI Library.
Assisted moving website development by Infoxchange’s Social Design team (~50 sites a year) from a home-grown proprietary content management system to open source Drupal CMS.
Designed and developed a credit card payment module for Infoxchange’s proprietary content management system, used on websites like Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, Jobseeker.org.au and many more.

Freelance Web Developer

2003 to 2005

Designed and developed a couriers scheduling system for couriers company Holland Parcel Express, Zaandam.
Developed various websites for small businesses in The Netherlands. Mostly static sites with some Perl/CGI scripts for guestbooks and photo galleries.

Education

Information Science B.S., University of Amsterdam

2000 to 2005

Minor Business Information Systems: Architecture & Infrastructure, Data Mining, Business Architecture and Modelling, Databases and Web-based Applications, E-business & E-government

Extra Curricular

Developed Chrome extensions Outlook.com Notifier and Outlook 365 Notifier 2012
Lead designer/developer, Website committee Student Surfing Association D.E.R.M. 2005
Writer and Graphic Designer, Student Surfing Association D.E.R.M. Magazine 2004
Founder Online Record label Xplizit.com 2000 to 2005