David Van Geest
Software Architect at Hopper
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Van Geest is a seasoned Software Architect with 14 years building resilient, distributed backend systems and event-driven architectures, currently leading platform efforts at Hopper. He has progressed through senior engineering and principal roles, shaping large-scale services, observability, and API design while mentoring teams and guiding technical strategy. A pragmatic engineer, he has hands-on experience modernizing legacy systems (VB.NET to Scala/Akka) and modularizing monoliths into independent services. An active open-source contributor, he has improved API ergonomics in the popular Tapir library and enhanced tracing/metrics compatibility in Kamon, showing attention to interoperability and production diagnostics. Based in Old Toronto, he pairs an electrical and computer engineering background with language fluency in French, which surfaces in cross-functional and international collaborations. Colleagues rely on him for clean error handling, pragmatic refactors, and shipping measurable improvements to observability and API reliability.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B2 Fluency, French, B2 Fluency, French at Université Stendhal Grenoble 3B.S.E., Electrical and Computer Engineering, French, B.S.E., Electrical and Computer Engineering, French at Calvin University
English, French
Stackoverflow
1,977reputation
380kreached
15answers
9questions
Github Skills (25)
tracer10
apidoc10
distributed-tracing10
http10
akka10
type-safety10
scala10
typesafe10
api10
datadog10
functional-programming10
kamon10
trace10
metric10
testing9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
softwaremill/tapir
Jun 2021 - Jul 2022
Rapid development of self-documenting APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 21 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the `tapir` library, focusing on API design and functionality. Their commits included making authorization-related features optional, fixing compilation errors in tests, and adding tests for HTTP status codes. They also refactored the codebase to improve error handling and overall code quality. The user demonstrated expertise in modifying server-side code.
functional-programmingendpointsobservabilityhttp4ssttp
kamon-io/Kamon
Aug 2020 - Jun 2021
Distributed Tracing, Metrics and Context Propagation for applications running on the JVM
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the Kamon project by addressing bugs and improving core functionality. Their work involved fixing a logger name issue in the DatadogSpanReporter, modifying Uber propagation header handling, and refactoring the project to use nanojson. The user also truncated 128-bit trace IDs for DataDog compatibility. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving tracing and metrics reporting within the application.
propagationcontext-propagationkamontracingotel
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