Thundr

Curriculum vitae

Laurens Debackere is a Computer Scientist. In 2021 he started offering IT consultancy services for businesses interested in using Solid and Linked Data to optimize their operations and improve user experience.

Cloud in the sky. Laurens is a Software Developer with experience in building microservices following the DevOps principles, using modern cloud-native technologies like Docker, Kubernetes and Spring Boot. While obtaining his Bachelor in Computer Science he first learned about the Solid Project, and has since gathered experience with the technology both in server-side contexts as well as in client-side applications. In the context of his thesis he researched ways to adapt the Solid specification to enterprise settings, while retaining the original principles of data governance and interoperability at the heart of the project. Currently, Laurens is active as ICT Solution Architect overseeing a five person development team realizing production-ready Solid use-cases for the Digitaal Vlaanderen and advises the Flemish Data Utility Company on the Solid specification.

Work experience

ICT Solution Architect #

January 2023 - Present | Digitaal Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

ICT Solution Architect on the MAGDA Solid development team, overseeing development and operations of technical backends for the Solid MVPs of the Flemish Data Utility Company.

Solid Technology Expert #

January 2023 - Present | Flemish Data Utility Company (Flemish Government)

Solid Technology Expert, advising the Flemish Data Utility Company on the Solid specification and representing the Flemish government in the W3C Solid Community Group.

ICT Expert Solid & Linked Data #

October 2021 - December 2022 | Digitaal Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

As a continuation of my internship I advised on the integration of Solid Pods in the service offering of the MAGDA Platform, both on a technical and architectural level, and oversaw the launch of a new internal Solid development team for realizing the Solid MVPs of the Flemish Data Utility Company.

Software Engineer - Solid & Linked Data (Internship) #

Summer 2021 | Digitaal Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

During this summer internship I worked as a developer with Digitaal Vlaanderen’s MAGDA Platform, in this context I was responsible for two projects:

  • Developing a proof-of-concept Solid integration platform, allowing MAGDA services to transparently integrate and interact with the information stored in the Pods.
  • Automating the MAGDA Statuspage through the monitoring information provided by the OpenShift container platform.

Software Engineer (Internship) #

Summer 2020 | Informatie Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

During this summer internship I worked as a developer on the modernisation team for Informatie Vlaanderen’s MAGDA platform, a few of the cases I worked on:

  • Modernisation and re-writing of common libraries using the Spring Boot framework.
  • Automation of status page updates for the MAGDA platform using Spring Cloud Kubernetes and the StatusPage.io API.
  • Improving high-level documentation on the modernisation efforts of MAGDA
  • Implementation of an OAuth API client for our integration testing project.
  • Development of a proof-of-concept service for connecting MAGDA to Solid data pods.

Software Engineer (Internship) #

Summer 2019 | Informatie Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

Over the course of the summer I worked on the modernisation effort of Informatie Vlaanderen’s MAGDA platform. On the project I was responsible for porting a number of existing libraries to JDK 11 and Spring Boot and aiding development of a new Business Service for the platform. Alongside a team of experienced architects and developers, I also reworked our Audit Logging technology stack using RabbitMQ and Spring’s AMQP integration to provide optimised asynchronous logging for our new business services with use of Spring Boot starters to facilitate future integration in new projects. I also helped deliver an automated post-deployment integration testing suite with Slack and JFrog Artifactory integration to automatically publish integration test reports for new builds.

Technologies used:

  • JDK 11
  • Spring & Spring Boot
  • RabbitMQ
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Maven
  • Cucumber BDD-testing
  • BitBucket Pipelines

Information Management (Internship) #

Summer 2018 | Informatie Vlaanderen (Flemish Government)

Over the course of the summer I participated in redesigning and rewriting the technical documentation of the MAGDA platform. I also developed internal tooling and templating to facilitate the documentation process and developed a new application for managing metadata on the API services of Informatie Vlaanderen.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science #

2017 - 2020 | Ghent University

Graduated Magna Cum Laude in the minor “Security & Parallel Systems”.

Master of Science in Computer Science #

2017 - 2022 | Ghent University

Graduated Summa Cum Laude.

  • Student representative in the Computer Science Programme Committee, the Education Committee of the Faculty of Sciences, the ICT User’s Committee of the Board of Governors of the University.
  • Elective courses:
    • Software Hacking & Protection
    • Recommender Systems
    • Image Processing
    • Financial and Cost Reporting in Enterprises
  • Noteworthy projects:
    • Our Parliament in Data: Advanced data visualisation based on a self-developed scraper of the meeting minutes obtained from the Federal Parliament.
    • Collimator detection in medical imaging: Project for the course “Image Processing” in collaboration with Agfa Medical Imaging, where we developed a Convolutional Neural Network to detect artifacts in medical imaging produced by X-Ray scanners.
  • Thesis: “Enforcing Data Protection in Solid: A Policy-Oriented Framework” supervised by Ruben Verborgh, Ruben Taelman and Pieter Colpaert.