You can find me on Twitter at @to1ne^[1]. I sometimes blog at writepermission.com and there's more to read about me at iotcl.com.

^[1]: twitter.com/to1ne

When Toon moved to the Gitaly team his day-to-day programming language changed from Ruby to Golang.

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.

^[1]: git-scm.com ^[2]: git-scm.com/docs/hash-function-transition

After years of hard work Toon's efforts were recognized with a promotion to Senior Backend Engineer.

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.

^[1]: gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/4710

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.

^[1]: about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp/

Because GitLab uses Golang for a few components, Toon started to learn about Go. He wrote some tools to learn about the language.

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].

^[1]: sidekiq.org

Toon started in the so-called Platform team at GitLab. That team was responsible for Git operations, Merge Requests, and more.

After leaving 10to1 Toon never touched Obj-C again. No problem, because Swift was on the rise anyway.

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.

More of that work would follow once he was hired.

^[1]: about.gitlab.com/releases/2016/11/22/gitlab-8-14-released/#delete-all-merged-branches

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.

After playing around with Ruby in his free time, Toon finally got an opportunity to work with those technologies professionally.

Some projects at 10to1 involved building applications for iOS devices.

At 10to1 projects for customers were built to demand. It was a great mix of different technologies with plenty of chances to learn new things.

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.

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.

While working with C++ all day, Toon grew an interest in Ruby and started playing around with it in his free time.

Software development for embedded Linux outdoor payment devices. Achievements: - Linux driver programming - Hardware integration - Event-driven & object-oriented application design in C++ - Design & implementation of software authentication & encryption - Maintenance & Certification of EMV Level 2 Contact Terminal Application Kernel

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.

This marks the end of Toon's education.

In 2008 Toon received his Master's degree at the KHK in Geel.

Toon's Master thesis was about speech technology.

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.

Toon started going to the only elementary school in his home town Achel.

Toon is born on a Sunday, right at noon, "Between the soup and the potatoes" as they would say.