Bas Van Dijk
Senior Software Engineer at DFINITY
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBas Van Dijk is a Staff Software Engineer and team lead based in Zurich with 19 years of experience building highly reliable systems using typed, pure functional programming (Haskell) alongside Rust and DevOps tooling. He leads developer experience and CI infrastructure at DFINITY, having architected self-hosted CI, Bazel builds, Kubernetes, and Linux VM fleets that run large-scale system and security tests for a blockchain project. Practical about quality, he balances engineering rigor with startup pragmatism—knowing when to cut corners to meet deadlines and when to pay down technical debt. A long-time open-source contributor, his work touches cornerstone projects like GHC, NixOS/hydra and aeson, improving compiler concurrency, build reliability and JSON performance. He’s also an entrepreneur and former CTO who split time between hands-on engineering and sales, recruiting and business development, bringing both technical depth and commercial sensibility. Notably, he blends low-level performance fixes with infrastructure automation, making him as comfortable optimizing memory behavior as designing CI pipelines.
19 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Radboud Universiteit NijmegenBS, Computer Software Engineering, BS, Computer Software Engineering at Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
873reputation
120kreached
0answers
3questions
Github Skills (71)
cargo10
nix10
testing10
http10
automation10
build-automation10
haskell10
concurrency10
ssh10
rust-lang10
memory-management10
nixos10
data-serialization10
framework-design10
performance-optimization10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
dfinity/ic
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Internet Computer blockchain source: the client/replica software run by nodes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:994 reviews, 219 commits, 336 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Bas primarily focused on improving the security and functionality of the Internet Computer's (IC) blockchain source code. Their contributions involved modifying system tests, renaming jobs, and enabling upgraded system tests to ensure code quality and stability. Furthermore, the user implemented and verified the creation and management of security features and key stores within the IC's framework. They also integrated a new library for supporting system functions.
replicablockchainnodesdfinityinternet
haskell/aeson
Jul 2011 - Dec 2015
A fast Haskell JSON library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:129 commits, 9 PRs, 15 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Bas primarily contributed to the `aeson` library by adding support for encoding and decoding various Haskell types, particularly focusing on data structures like `Either`, vectors, and tuples. Their work involved implementing `ToJSON` and `FromJSON` instances for these types, ensuring that `fromJSON . toJSON == id` holds true. They also integrated generic JSON serialization and deserialization through the use of GHC generics, improving the performance of the library.
haskelljson-libraryservanthackagejson
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