Niels is available for hire

Niels Sluijs

Verified Expert in Engineering

Drupal Developer

Location

Alkmaar, Netherlands

Toptal Member Since

October 5, 2022

Niels is a Drupal developer with 10+ of experience and an open, inquiring, and innovative mind. He is a good listener and strong contributor both individually and as part of a team, excelling in one-on-one and group communication. Keen to learn new skills, Niels always seeks to achieve a high standard in his work and appreciates working with innovative techniques that make a step forward in delivering advanced internet services.

Software Engineering Algorithms Caching Back-end Drupal 7 PHP Drupal 8 PHP 7 Git Migration Distributed Systems Quality Assurance (QA)Spring Dependency Injection (DI)Databases Java Optimizely

Portfolio

Sicse

Drupal, Drupal 7, Drupal 8, PhpStorm, PHP, Composer, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap...

Ghent University

Programming, Data Structures, Databases, Networking, Operating Systems...

Experience

Software Engineering - 20 years Programming - 20 years Caching - 17 years Drupal 7 - 12 years PHP - 12 years Drupal - 12 years Drupal 9 - 3 years Drupal 10 - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

PhpStorm, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), DDEV, Drupal, Composer

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is a complete rebuild of a Dutch healthcare site with more than one million unique visitors per month.

Work Experience

Drupal expert

2012 - PRESENT

Sicse

Developed multiple Drupal websites and applications as a full-stack freelance developer for VodafoneZiggo, KVK, SURFsara, LVNL, and the Drupal agencies SWIS, DOP, and Atom.
Created the server-sided code highlighting module for Drupal and maintained the Vendor Stream Wrapper module.
Presented at the Dutch Drupaljam event, showing the advantages of using token replacements in combination with Drupal's Typed Data API and Serialization API to communicate with external APIs.
Provided multiple patches for Drupal modules such as facets, search API, webform country list, Commerce Billy, views infinite scroll, Optimizely, IP login, registration codes, and feeds tamper.

Technologies: Drupal, Drupal 7, Drupal 8, PhpStorm, PHP, Composer, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, AngularJS, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Sass, Gulp, Twig, Linux, Bash, Zsh, Oh My Zsh, Apache, MySQL, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Docker, DDEV, Xdebug, Drush, Git, Git Flow, PHPUnit, Phing, REST APIs, JSON API, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Dependency Injection, Drupal 9, Bitbucket, GitLab CI/CD, GitLab, Jira, Back-end, Solr, Programming, Data Structures, Operating Systems, Software Engineering, Caching, Presentations, Algorithms, Quality Assurance (QA), Coaching, Migration, Networking, Databases, Content Management Systems (CMS), RabbitMQ, PHP 7

Computer Science Engineering Researcher

2006 - 2012

Ghent University

Performed research on peer-to-peer (P2P) services that locate content and transport live media streams to end users.
Participated in the PeCMan and OMUS projects, which studied different aspects of delivering content to end users.
Acted as an instructor for the programming course and supervised students in carrying out their master's thesis.

Technologies: Programming, Data Structures, Databases, Networking, Operating Systems, Statistics, Software Engineering, Grid Computing, Concurrent Programming, Simulations, Distributed Systems, Integer Programming, Distributed Hash Tables (DHT), Simulated Annealing, Peer-to-peer Networking, Supercomputers, Caching, Scientific Data Analysis, University Teaching, Presentations, Algorithms, Java, Linux, Bash, CPLEX, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Spring Dependency Injection (DI), Coaching

Experience

Dutch Healthcare Site for Roularta

https://www.gezondheidsnet.nl/

Completely rebuilt the Gezondheidsnet site to Drupal 9, a healthcare site containing 80.000 articles and has more than one million unique visitors a month. As the lead Drupal back-end developer, I ensured that all custom functionality was implemented correctly and all content was migrated to the new data models.

Service Number Consolidation Project for VodafoneZiggo

A Drupal portal for the Service Number Consolidation project, with which routing intelligence in telephony calls can be set up and managed by non-technical employees. My role was to develop the Drupal portal, which forms the graphical interface for the customer and end-users and communicates with an internal API. The communication with the API, which stores and offers all data and makes the underlying system available abstractly, takes place using the JSON API specification. During this project, I also coached a junior Drupal developer.

Smartengeld Website for ANWB

https://www.smartengeld.nl/

Helped upgrade the ANWB's Smartengeld website to Drupal 9. The site contains legal cases that interest mainly the police, lawyers, and law students. Full versions of the content are only available via a subscription. Users may log in based on their IP address or have a limited number of sessions that can open simultaneously.

Porting the Release and Update Software to Drupal 8

Ported the software release updating functionality from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. LVNL uses this Drupal site to manage the information-providing software versions' deployment process for their air traffic controllers. My work involved transforming the functionality to Drupal 8 and improving the custom code to the latest standards.

Council Clerk Dashboard for the Municipality of Rotterdam

I have developed with the Drupal agency Atom the council information system for the municipality of Rotterdam. Besides working as a back-end developer, I was also responsible for ensuring that all code was high-quality and future-proof.

Education

2006 - 2012

Doctorate in Computer Science Engineering

Ghent University - Ghent, Belgium

2004 - 2006

Master of Science Degree in Grid Computing

University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2001 - 2004

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science

University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Certifications

NOVEMBER 2018 - PRESENT

RabbitMQ

NobleProg

Skills

Languages

PHP, PHP 7, Java, C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Sass, Bash

Paradigms

Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Concurrent Programming, Dependency Injection

Platforms

Drupal, Drupal 7, Drupal 8, Linux, Docker

Other

Programming, Software Engineering, Simulated Annealing, Caching, Algorithms, Drupal 9, Migration, Back-end, Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal 10, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), DDEV, Data Structures, Networking, Statistics, Simulations, Distributed Systems, Integer Programming, University Teaching, Presentations, Git Flow, Quality Assurance (QA), Spring Dependency Injection (DI), Coaching, Operating Systems, Grid Computing, Distributed Hash Tables (DHT), Peer-to-peer Networking, Supercomputers, Scientific Data Analysis

Tools

PhpStorm, Composer, Xdebug, Drush, Git, Phing, RabbitMQ, Gulp, Zsh, Oh My Zsh, Apache, CPLEX, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Bitbucket, Jira, Solr

Storage

Databases, MySQL

Frameworks

Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, AngularJS, Twig, PHPUnit

Libraries/APIs

jQuery, REST APIs, JSON API

Collaboration That Works

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