Software Engineer & Consultant
Joshua
Thijssen
25+ years turning complex problems into clean, maintainable systems — from kernel drivers to cloud-native architectures.
Software Engineer & Consultant
25+ years turning complex problems into clean, maintainable systems — from kernel drivers to cloud-native architectures.
With over 25 years of professional development experience, I've probably seen it all. From writing Solaris kernel drivers to writing software to detect bad cucumbers — I enjoy finding out how things work by recreating them from scratch. Personal projects include operating systems, programming languages, and an RDBMS. Currently mostly focused on cryptography, security, APIs, microservices, and CI/CD systems.
From physical hardware to cloud containerisation, I've managed Linux infrastructure at every layer. Understanding what lives beneath the abstractions matters — misconfigured VPCs and insecure defaults don't hide from someone who knows the stack end-to-end.
Cutting through complexity to find solutions that actually work, not just ones that sound good in a meeting.
From overall architecture to the details of implementation, helping companies make the right technical decisions at every level.
Author of Mastering the SPL, the Symfony Deep-dive series, and Python for PHP Developers. Regular speaker at international conferences and local meetups — I enjoy making hard topics approachable.
DevOps is a result — the outcome of development and operations actually collaborating, not a job title or a tool set. Bridging that gap and building cultures where shipping is calm and repeatable is where I add the most value.
Building modular healthcare applications centred around FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), with a strong focus on security and privacy. The work involves a broad range of cryptographic techniques including symmetric and asymmetric encryption, OPRF (Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions), and integration with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) — ensuring sensitive patient data never leaves a trusted boundary unprotected.
Developed backend systems for national COVID-19 infrastructure — high-stakes, high-throughput applications where correctness and security were non-negotiable. Built in Python, PHP, and Laravel, with a continued emphasis on cryptography and security throughout.
Previously worked across a range of industries including e-commerce, streaming services, travel, and printing — among others.
Rust
The language that makes you think about memory before the runtime has to. Increasingly my choice for systems-level work, CLI tooling, and anywhere performance and safety need to coexist.
Go
Often coined "a better C," but realistically it's far more than that. My go-to for performant services, tooling, and anything where correctness and simplicity matter.
PHP
Even though I started my career with embedded C, PHP keeps returning as a constant thread. Deep expertise across the full history of the language and its ecosystem.
Symfony
Combines the best practices of Spring and Django into a PHP framework I've used extensively — including official certification at expert level.
Python
If PHP is my first love, Python is the second. Invaluable for scripting, data work, and rapid prototyping — and the subject of one of my published books.
C / Java
Where it all started. C for multi-platform libraries and kernel-level work; Java from the Applet and AWT era through enterprise systems.
AWS
Experience ranging from $1K to $100K+ monthly budgets. ECS, EKS, and a strong focus on cost optimisation and security posture.
Kubernetes
Setup and management with Kops, from single-cluster hobby projects to production multi-cluster environments with full CI/CD integration.
CI/CD
Jenkins, Drone.io, CodeDeploy, GitLab CI/CD — building pipelines that make deployments boring in the best possible way.
Life would be a lot easier if software engineering were a licensed profession. Until then, here's the paper trail.
Helped over 50 companies and organisations build, scale, and maintain their software.
NoxLogic
Steenbokstraat 27 Unit D
7324AZ Apeldoorn, NL
KvK: 11059844
VAT: NL001887547B51
IBAN: NL61ABNA0421639741
BIC: ABNANL2A
Note for recruiters: I do not accept unsolicited emails. I know you have the perfect opportunity with a large company looking for [keyword] developers — I'm very happy with my current network. Please don't reach out cold.