82f3ab3skill/c
skill: Learning about the Git source code
Date:
Interest in the Git[1] project kept growing, Toon wanted to be involved in that
project. Toon participated on the mailing list and when he was getting into
SHA256 support[2] he managed to get his first changes merged.
There was a need for people to review changes related to database use. It was
then Toon stepped forward and dove deep into PostgreSQL and became [1] a
database maintainer responsible of reviewing merge requests that make changes to
how the database is used, and ensure those changes work at scale.
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achievement: Contribute to the migration to GCP
Date:
In 2018 GitLab decided to migrate from Azure to GCP. GitLab Geo played a key
role in this migration. It allowed us to have a hot standby in GCP, so the
migration could happen with a minimal on downtime.
Many skilled people, including Toon as one of the experts on the Geo team, made
the migration happen as smooth as possible.
After working in the Platform team, Toon moved to the Geo team. That team is
responsible of building a Geo-distributed solution into GitLab. With GitLab Geo
customers can install GitLab at their different offices and have them
synchronize data between those installations. This allows their employees to
have quick access to everything to do their job.
Toon was responsible of the maintenance of the REST API, and he led the path to
introduce API v4. All deprecations and breaking changes we wanted to make had to
happen in the upcoming major release GitLab v9.0.
Most of the GitLab codebase is written in Ruby. While working in the GitLab
Platform team, Toon dealed a lot with background workers powered by Sidekiq[1].
During the interview process Toon was tasked to build a button (and backend
code) to delete all branches that are merged into the default branch[1]. This
change made him get the job and also was awarded as MVP for GitLab 8.14.
At 10to1 the first experience was gained with the awesome RDBMS PostgreSQL.
Thanks to the friendly and skilled colleagues, Toon learned about things like
proper Index practices, Enumerated Types, Materialized Views, and more.
The job at 10to1 also involved frontend work, mostly HTML and CSS. Although we
mostly used static HTML with Ruby on Rails there was also one project where
Ember.js.
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skill: Mobile development with Objective-C
Date:
After teaching himself Ruby, Toon wanted to get into mobile app development for
iOS. So he picked up a book from The Big Nerd Ranch and learned app development
with Objective-C.
He once pitched a mobile app at his employer, with a working prototype, but
there wasn't any interest because they opted for a web app instead.
After a few years Toon got the opportunity to follow a three-day Advanced C++
course. This was really insightful to learn about the internals of iterators and
traits and what not.
C++11 was around the corner, and there was plenty exciting stuff coming to the
language.
At his first job Toon worked in C++. His job was building software for an
embedded Linux payment terminal device. These applications were written in C++,
but his job also involved bits of plain C when working on GNU/Linux kernel
drivers.
C++ was the first real programming language Toon was thaught in school. A pretty
advanced language to get started with, but it thaught him a lot about
programming in general.
Around this time, or maybe earlier, Toon started to build websites. Nothing
exciting yet, mostly small projects for fun and friends. The interest in web
technology never went away since.
There was an interest in technology from the start. So Toon chose to follow a
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education called
"Industrial Sciences" at TIO in Overpelt. This included plenty of mathematics,
combined with chemistry, physics, strength theory, and electronics.