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 a multitasking OS (cybos), a programming language (saffire), and an RDBMS. Currently focused on APIs, microservices, CI/CD systems, React, and backend 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.
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.
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.