Bart Van Der Werf
Lead Engineer at Plukit BV
Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBart Van Der Werf is a Lead Engineer based in the Netherlands with 16 years of experience building and shipping game engines, tools, and indie titles as a founder and principal engineer. He has led teams and studios—founding Staxel and Plukit BV, co-founding VoxRay Games, and holding senior engine roles at Ludeon Studios and Chucklefish—bridging product leadership with deep technical ownership. His open-source contributions include low-level work on game and multimedia projects (notably improvements to the FNA XNA reimplementation and vector/string primitives in the Lobster language), showing a knack for systems, audio, and voxel/parsing problems. Equally at home in C++ engine internals and higher-level game design, he combines entrepreneurial grit with a pragmatic focus on reliability and performance. A less obvious strength is his sustained habit of shipping small, focused technical fixes (audio handling, memory leaks, parsing tweaks) that materially improve long-running projects.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
University of TwenteVrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)
English, Dutch
Github Skills (14)
csharp10
fn10
xna10
dotnet-core10
opengl9
data-structure9
strings9
algorithm9
data-structures9
text-manipulation9
algorithms9
linux8
voxel-engine8
windows8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
FNA-XNA/FNA
Feb 2018 - Jan 2022
FNA - Accuracy-focused XNA4 reimplementation for open platforms
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 15 PRs, 23 comments in 4 years
Contributions summary:Bart primarily worked on improving the FNA XNA reimplementation. They fixed a bug in audio processing by correctly handling the master voice creation failure and cleaned up the AudioContext. The user also expanded functionality related to texture data pointers in multiple files and added checks for audio listeners. Finally, they addressed a string leak in text input handling.
windowsgamedevplatformslinuxsteamos
aardappel/lobster
May 2022 - Oct 2022
The Lobster Programming Language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 20 commits, 19 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Bart primarily contributed to the Lobster programming language itself, implementing new built-in functions and improving existing ones, particularly related to vector operations and string manipulation. They fixed typos, introduced features such as `magnitude_squared`, `spherical_lerp`, and implemented warnings for type mismatches. Additionally, the user improved the parsing of .vox files for the voxel editor.
compilerprogramming-languageinterpretermojo
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.