Dobes Vandermeer
Lead Developer Principal Engineer at Newsela
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDobes Vandermeer is a pragmatic principal engineer and lead developer with 14 years of experience helping startups and tech companies initiate and accelerate software delivery from code to cloud. Based in Vancouver, he blends hands-on full‑stack development in TypeScript/Node and React with AWS/Kubernetes operations, CI/CD, and production debugging for mission‑critical EdTech systems. He has a track record of shipping secure integrations with third‑party platforms (Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot) and mentoring teams on agile practices and performance troubleshooting. An active open‑source contributor, Dobes has improved tooling across well‑known projects like Kubernetes test‑infra, DefinitelyTyped, and the Elasticsearch Fluentd plugin, often focusing on reliability, auth, and multi‑cluster networking. His background spans founding startups and architecting systems at scale, bringing both entrepreneurial pragmatism and deep backend craftsmanship to complex distributed systems.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Game Design, Game Design at Game WhisperingBritish Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)Personal Development, Personal Development at Landmark EducationHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Brooks Secondary School
English, Chinese, Spanish
Stackoverflow
8,650reputation
1.9mreached
66answers
22questions
nginx
top-5%
cors
top-1%
coffeescript
top-1%
Github Skills (68)
testing10
authentication10
type-definition10
type-system10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
port-forwarding10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
rest-api10
fluentd10
k8s10
elasticsearch-api10
javascript10
amazon-elasticsearch10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
Jun 2018 - Oct 2020
The repository for high quality TypeScript type definitions.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 review, 28 commits, 26 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Dobes primarily contributed to type definition improvements and corrections within the `definitelytyped` repository, focusing on the `stripe`, `mongodb`, `gapi.auth2`, `papaparse`, `react-datepicker`, `react-helmet`, `draft-js`, `parquetjs`, `react-dnd-multi-backend`, and `ioredis` libraries. These changes involved adding optional fields, fixing type errors, and updating dependencies to improve type safety and usability. The user also updated the examples/tests of the types to match their code changes.
typescript-definitionstype-definitionshigh-qualitydtsdefinitions
apache/drill
Feb 2020 - Mar 2020
Apache Drill is a distributed MPP query layer for self describing data
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 19 PRs, 79 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Dobes's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the Apache Drill's functionality through back-end development. They addressed a typo in a class name, introduced support for HTTP Basic authentication for REST API calls, and implemented a feature enabling password authentication using htpasswd files for containerized environments. Moreover, the user contributed to MongoDB integration by adding credential store support and fixing a method name. These changes improve security, authentication flexibility, and overall usability of the data querying layer.
jdbcdatastreambig-datadatabasehadoop
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