Profile
My name is Dirk Engels and I am a passionate software engineer living in Amsterdam. I love building systems while aiming for simplicity. In my free time I like to spend time with my family and friends, play a game of pinball, start yet another hobby software project or work on my balcony garden.
I enjoy building technical solutions, but also enjoy bringing people together and building connections. At university I have learned how to design systems and gather requirements effectively. During my previous work experiences I have shown these skills in practice. I like to communicate with the end-users of the systems directly to get a good understanding of the issues they are facing.
Experiences
During my professional work I have worked with over thousands of people from all over the world. Only a few of them I will mention here as a reference.
In the start-up Local Heroes I was responsible for developing the backend API, internal systems and DevOps. The legacy PHP backend was refactored into a more maintainable codebase and moved shared code into a middleware layer, which increased the development velocity and improved stability. I have implemented the financial systems (invoicing, payments and promotional codes) with various checks and balances. The software was running on Amazon AWS (S3/EC2), Heroku and Netlify. Deploys are triggered using Github actions. At Local Heroes I have worked intensively with Giel, Chris & Mick.
At booking.com I have worked on projects for many departments (front-end, customer service, hotels, finance) and in many roles (developer, team leader, trainer).
Front-End
The first year at booking.com I have worked with various front-end related teams.
Here I implemented the required backend endpoints and services.
This really helped understanding the various parts of the business.
Customer Service
Most of the time I have worked with the customer service department.
Here I have lead the team responsible for refactoring the legacy application logic into more maintainable software, which reduced bugs, improved security, monitoring & reporting and increased the development team velocity.
This had a big impact on the department and the company as fewer people are required to handle the same amount of work.
The API layer was later used by many other department because of its simplicity and integration with existing tooling.
Here I have worked intensively with Neda, Maria, Eduardo, and many more.
Voice / Telephony
The CS department makes a lot of use of the telephone system, so our team was tasked to integrate our Cisco telephone system with our internally developed CRM system.
It reduced customer handling times and improved reporting capabilities.
Here I have worked with: Peter, Giel & Ramuns.
Hotels Department
Here I mostly was interested in optimizing the performance of the systems used by hotels owners.
This was done by optimizing code and SQL queries by debugging stacktraces, but also giving training to other colleagues to improve their skills and knowledge of (internal) systems.
At this department I have worked intensively with Steve & Stevan.
Finance department
At the finance department I worked on the dispute tooling and adjusting the system to new tax regulations.
I helped integrate the credit control system with the customer service tooling.
This improved communication between departments and improved the prioritization of incoming requests.
At the finance department I have worked intensively with Renko & Maarten.
For ibuildings.nl I have worked on projects for various customers, such as vakantieveilingen.nl and Bas Trucks. For Bas Trucks we developed a custom made CRM application. For vakantieveilingen.nl I have implemented the integration with a gift wrapping supplier. At ibuildings I worked together with Matthijs, Mark & Evert.
My first IT job was at straus reizen & vakantie. The boss was used to create HTML pages manually after which I introduced PHP dynamically generate generate many web pages. This made content creation scalable and increased website traffic and sales. At this company I worked together with Vincent & Aron.