Reliably Coded BV

Made with care

Delivering my best work is built on a basis of respecting each other’s expertise, insight and resources, inevitably adjusting along the way, and asking enough questions. I also know when to say no to projects that isn't a good fit.

Reliability and quality

Being thorough in my work always includes use rigorous automated testing, that verify each feature works as designed and continues to do so. Most projects use a CI system to automatically run all tests and quality checks for all changes, reducing the risk of introducing issues.

Security and privacy

Risk awareness in security and privacy is always on my mind. That means continously reviewing where new security risks may arise, where external expertise may be needed, and helping clients make informed choices. Security checks always receive extra attention in automated testing.

Open source

Many projects I work on are open source. I like developing in the open and allowing contributions and reuse by others. I am experienced in interacting with and managing open source communities of various sizes.

Internet Routing Registry daemon v4

IRRd is a routing registry server, which allows network operators to store information about their network, to support automated configuration for their own and other networks. Most network operators on the internet depend directly or indirectly on IRRd.

I started this as a complete rewrite of an unmaintained legacy project. I rewrote it in Python, with extendability, high reliability and backwards compatibility in mind. This included a thorough testing suite, and automated comparisons between the new IRRd version 4 and previous versions. NTT Communications depends on IRRd every day to configure parts of their network, and failures can cause client outages. version 4 was successfully deployed in production in 2019. Since then, it has also been deployed by ARIN, LACNIC and others. The entire project is released as open source.

IRRexplorer

IRRexplorer is a popular tool for network operators to analyse and debug their IRR configuration. It highlights misconfigurations that can lead to network reachability issues, and provides hints on how to resolve those.

An existing version of the tool had issues in user experience, maintainability and completeness. I developed a completely new version from scratch for Stichting NLNOG under a grant from the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund. I also expanded it with more advanced features and increased the quality and depth of the analysis.

MANRS support tools

MANRS is an initiative, supported by the Internet Society, to support and encourage safe deployment and configuration practices by network operators. I built additional tooling that looked at MRT and RPKI data to support the MANRS team in verifying compliance.

IETF datatracker & meetings

The IETF datatracker tracks work on IETF standards, including reviews on documents, and is a Python/Django codebase. For the review tool, I designed and implemented several architectural improvements and refactoring, and solved many different issues. I also developed an automatic scheduler for IETF meetings, which involve over 100 sessions with many different requirements and constraints. The automatic scheduler saves staff significant time and effort, by proposing ideal schedules.

Healthcare management portal

Since 2014, responsibility for many kinds of youth healthcare was moved from the national Dutch level, to the municipal level. Over several years, I designed and built a portal for municipalities to handle contract signing and management, advance budget requests, budget monitoring, and reporting. Up to 45 municipalities in the Netherlands used this portal to support their healthcare management transition, which represented about 20% of the Dutch population.

Write the Docs

In 2018, I joined the Write the Docs core operations team, after volunteering for a few years. Write the Docs is a community for documentarians with over 5000 members in Slack and at least three conferences ever year, with nearly 1000 attendees in total. I work on conference organising, website automation and improvements, support and other responsibilities.

Django Web Framework

Django is the most popular open source web framework for Python, powering products like Instagram and Pinterest. I was a committer and team member until 2018. My first major contribution was IPv6 support in the ORM and several other parts. Most recently, I designed and developed modular password validation support, which has reasonable defaults, but is easy to adjust, extend, or link to existing APIs. I am the former vice chair of the CoC committee, and was involved in organising four major Django conferences over the years.