Erik Gaal
Senior Fullstack Engineer at Superscript
Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolErik Gaal is a Senior Fullstack Engineer based in Rotterdam with 11 years of experience building scalable web and fintech systems, currently driving product delivery at Superscript. He combines hands-on backend expertise in Laravel/Eloquent with fullstack delivery, having led engineering at Scrn and shipped growth-focused CMS features earlier in his career. A regular open-source contributor, Erik has improved core Laravel components and tooling—working on popular projects like illuminate/database, laravel/framework and Spatie packages—bringing stronger type safety, event sourcing support and query-builder refinements. He has a pragmatic focus on maintainability and developer productivity, adding tests, refactors and serializer improvements across repositories. Comfortable navigating startup and scale-up contexts, he pairs feature delivery with attention to data handling and API ergonomics. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful, low-friction improvements that reduce technical debt while accelerating product metrics.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
University of TwenteBachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Utrecht UniversityVWO, VWO at RSG Tromp Meesters
Dutch, English
Stackoverflow
398reputation
11kreached
20answers
0questions
Github Skills (38)
data-validation10
query-builder10
laravel-mix10
testing10
query-tuning10
query-optimization10
laravel10
event-sourcing10
phpunit10
database-tuning10
eloquent-orm10
typehinting10
php10
code-analysis10
type-checking10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
spatie/laravel-event-sourcing
Aug 2020 - Jul 2022
The easiest way to get started with event sourcing in Laravel
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 5 PRs, 9 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Erik primarily contributed to the implementation of event sourcing features within the Laravel framework. Their work included adding a CarbonNormalizer for serializing and deserializing Carbon date objects, enhancing the event serialization process. They also added tests for Carbon date deserialization and refactored the code for improved maintainability. Furthermore, the user updated the code to match strict Symfony types and exclude a function name from potential handlers.
projectionevent-sourcingeventget-startedphp
larastan/larastan
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
⚗️ Adds code analysis to Laravel improving developer productivity and code quality.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 4 commits, 10 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Erik primarily contributed to the `larastan/larastan` repository, which focuses on code analysis for Laravel projects. Their work included implementing support for generic paginators, refactoring model property casting, handling native enum casts, and correcting arguments for casts. They also added a stub for the `transform` helper method and the `Tappable` trait. These changes enhanced the type analysis capabilities of the tool.
productivityphpdeveloper-productivityphpstancode-quality
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