Alex Van Boxel
Principal System Architect at Collibra
Brussels Metropolitan Area Belgium
Summary
🤩
RockstarAlex Van Boxel is a Principal System Architect based in Brussels with 14 years of hands-on experience designing and delivering complex distributed systems across R&D, big data, and cloud platforms. He combines deep backend engineering skills with practical architecture discipline—emphasizing understandability, consistency, connectivity, and observability—to guide teams from specification through deployment. At Collibra and prior roles at Veepee and Vente‑Exclusive he shaped large-scale data and cloud architectures, and his open-source contributions to projects like Apache Beam, Airflow, and OpenTelemetry demonstrate a knack for improving cloud integrations and telemetry in widely used platforms. Comfortable in both code and governance, he also helps grow the community through meetups and steering roles at Devoxx and the Beam Summit. Notably, his recent work added trace parsing to the OpenTelemetry Collector and enhanced GCP support in Airflow, reflecting a focus on making observability and cloud data workflows more robust and reliable.
14 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
English, Dutch, French
Stackoverflow
685reputation
55kreached
6answers
4questions
xml
top-5%
Github Skills (40)
apache-airflow10
bigquery10
data-pipelines10
python10
data-engineering10
work-flow10
workflow-engine10
java10
gcp10
google-cloud-storage10
etl10
javas10
automation10
go10
opentelemetry10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/beam
Feb 2018 - Apr 2020
Apache Beam is a unified programming model for Batch and Streaming data processing.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 45 PRs, 20 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Alex contributed to the Apache Beam project by addressing issues related to Java code, specifically within the context of Google Cloud Platform integration and schema handling. Their work involved correcting JavaDoc examples for BigQuery write operations and adding support for field name delimiters. Additionally, the user fixed timestamp handling issues for Schema Aware PCollection within the BigQuery integration, and they worked on enhancing the DynamicMessage handling capabilities within the ProtoCoder. These changes collectively improve the library's usability and reliability for data processing tasks.
golangpythonstreaming-databeambatch
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib
Apr 2021 - Mar 2022
Contrib repository for the OpenTelemetry Collector
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:42 reviews, 5 commits, 19 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib repository by implementing trace attributes and parsers. These changes involved modifying Go code to handle `trace_id`, `span_id`, and `trace_flags` within the log collection pipeline. The user's work also includes adding tests to validate the functionality of the new trace parsing capabilities.
contribopentelemetry-collectortracingtempoobservability
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