Merijntje Tak
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Merijntje is a highly motivated engineer with several years of experience and a demonstrated project history with DevOps, Bash, and big data platforms. He will work with whatever stack gives the client the best solution. Aside from his technical skills, he brings a wide range of soft skills, including analysis, creativity, and a "make it work" attitude. Merijntje believes that's what makes great engineers stand out from the crowd, as it helps give customers what they need.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
IT Infrastructure, Configuration Management, Big Data, Linux
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is a big data platform—processing 1 million messages per second on 600 servers.
Work Experience
Lead DevOps Engineer
Liberty Global
- Developed a big data platform's architecture. It's currently scaled to over 600 physical servers, 2,000 data pipelines, and 1 million messages per second and hundreds of internal users.
- Debugged and fixed performance bottlenecks in Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Logstash when scaling to thousands of topics, millions of messages, and tens of thousands of shards.
- Developed CI/CD and configuration management for all infrastructure components and data pipeline deployment using Jenkins and Ansible.
- Oversaw the detailed hardware selection for server and network components in the project; when scaling to 600 servers and spending millions of euros on hardware, getting exactly the right hardware for the load becomes vital.
Lead Technical Innovation Specialist
Defensie
- Oversaw the concept development and experimentation for the Dutch Armed Forces in cooperation with NATO.
- Worked on identification and authorization technologies.
- Contributed to intelligence and profiling technologies.
- Developed battlefield communications technologies.
Chef and Deployment Consultant
Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment (NL)
- Developed a 1-click deployment solution for a middleware platform using Chef and Jenkins.
- Built a Terraform-like infrastructure orchestration framework for deployment on AWS.
- Constructed custom Chef cookbooks and libraries for the deployment of applications.
- Installed and troubleshot Java middleware applications.
DevOps Engineer
Digidentity BV
- Developed Chef cookbooks to deploy custom Ruby-on-Rails applications.
- Created Chef cookbooks for automated VM provisioning.
- Set up a virtualization environment for running production and development CI/CD clusters.
Senior Unix Systems Engineer
T-Mobile Netherlands
- Managed the entire Unix server infrastructure for an ISP in The Netherlands with 300.000 customers.
- Maintained a DHCP solution for all DSL modems used by customers based on FreeRADIUS.
- Maintained most services and ISP has, e.g., DHCP, DNS, Usenet, and web hosting for customers.
Unix Engineer and Coordinator
Tele2 Netherlands
- Served as the single point of contact for all IT-related departments with regards to all outages and ad-hoc requests for infrastructure and services provided by the team; I was also responsible for all these issues getting fixed by the team.
- Embedded a 3PAR SAN (with fabric) into the infrastructure teams by providing guidelines and training.
- Acted as an interim scrum master for the team with the guidance of Scrum coaches.
Unix Server Specialist
Ziggo
- Maintained and deployed Sun Solaris systems for business applications.
- Built a monitoring solution based on Sun Management Center.
- Supported internal clients in the installation and maintainence of their applications.
Management Systems Engineer
Ericsson
- Managed telecom network management applications and servers, mostly based on Ericsson OSS-RC and HP OpenView NNM.
- Handled Solaris and Windows system administration, including Veritas Volume Manager.
- Temporarily led a team of network operators during a trial for a prospective customer.
Experience
Cloud-provisioning Framework
The tool was written in Ruby and would take JSON as an input. Based on that JSON input, it would create all the instances, VPCs, networks, and security groups on AWS. In addition, the tool would provision a Chef server for the deployment of their applications.
I learned to code Ruby for this assignment as it was already a language the customer was using for their Chef deployments. For me, it's important to focus on the customer's needs and how they do things. The customer didn't have any technical teams. This project allowed me to provide them with a "one-click" deployment to be used by their functional application administrators.
Skills
Tools
Elastic, Mesos, Apache ZooKeeper, Kibana, Logstash, Git, Grafana, Apache, Chef, Rundeck, VMware, VMware vSphere, Terraform, Kafka Streams, Ansible, Jenkins, Telegraf, Flume, GitLab, Capistrano, Apache Tomcat, Jira
Paradigms
DevOps, Test-driven Development (TDD)
Platforms
Linux, Red Hat Linux, Apache Kafka, Docker, Ubuntu, Solaris, Apache2, Kubernetes, Amazon EC2, HP-UX, Oracle Database, Windows Server, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
Elasticsearch, HDFS, Cassandra, HP 3PAR, MySQL, Veritas Volume Manager
Other
IT Infrastructure, System Administration, Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), DNS, DNS Servers, Big Data, Configuration Management, Graphite, Filebeat, MAAS, Prometheus, HAProxy, Stakeholder Engagement, VMware ESXi, Cloud Infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Software Development, Networks, IP Networks, CCNA, Cisco Switches, Routing, CHRONOS, Apache Flume, Stakeholder Management, Military Operations, Digital Communication, Packet Communication, Authorization, Authentication, Threat Intelligence, WSO2, CI/CD Pipelines, DHCP, FreeRADIUS, Web Hosting, Sun Management Center (Sun MC), Ericsson OSS-RC, Big Sister
Languages
Bash, Bash Script, Ruby
Frameworks
Marathon, Spark, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Libraries/APIs
Mesosphere, Carbon, OpenLDAP
Education
Propaedeutic Degree in Computer Science
The Hague University - The Hague, The Netherlands
Certifications
Cisco Certified Network Associate
Cisco
Red Hat Certified System Administrator
Red Hat
Red Hat Certified Engineer
Red Hat
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