Diede Exterkate
Principal Engineer at Yoast
Gelderland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDiede Exterkate is a Principal Engineer with 11 years of experience, currently leading engineering efforts at Yoast from his base in Gelderland, Netherlands. He has grown through multiple roles at Yoast—from intern focused on performance optimization to development lead and now principal—demonstrating deep, long-term ownership of the WordPress SEO product. His work includes notable backend contributions to the widely used Yoast SEO plugin, where he streamlined core functionality, removed redundant code and feature flags, and improved addon installation flows. Diede combines hands-on PHP/WordPress engineering with team leadership and pragmatic code hygiene, often tackling tricky edge cases that improve reliability for millions of users. He holds a bachelor’s in software development from Avans and brings a propensity for optimization and simplification that surfaces in both product and process improvements.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Software development, Bachelor's degree Software development at Avans University of Applied SciencesHavo Natuur en Techniek, Havo Natuur en Techniek at Stedelijke Scholengemeenschap Nijmegen
Dutch, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (5)
plugin-development10
wordpress10
php10
seo10
refactoring8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
Yoast/wordpress-seo
Sep 2015 - Dec 2022
Yoast SEO for WordPress
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:124 reviews, 522 commits, 155 PRs in 7 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Diede primarily contributed to the Yoast SEO plugin by modifying core functionality. These changes include removing and reverting feature flags, adjusting the addon installation process, and optimizing code by removing redundant functions and handling various edge cases. These commits focused on improving the plugin's code base and removing unnecessary dependencies.
breadcrumbsschema-orgwordpressphpxml-sitemap
Yoast/website-menu-structure
Jul 2016 - Oct 2017
Contributions:11 PRs, 22 pushes, 15 branches in 1 year 3 months
yoastsites
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