Freek Van Der Herten
Developer at SPATIE (we're hiring 🚀 )
Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFreek Van Der Herten is a seasoned developer and partner at Spatie with 13+ years building and maintaining a wide array of Laravel and PHP open-source packages. Based in Antwerp, he focuses on backend architecture, resilience and developer tooling—contributing core features to projects like laravel-backup, responsecache, webhooks, and the popular Ray debugger. His work spans practical DevOps and developer-experience improvements (dotfiles, db-dumper, browsershot) as well as careful test and QA work, reflecting an emphasis on reliability and maintainability. Freek’s contributions often combine feature development with refactoring and automated style/tooling fixes, showing a pragmatic approach to long-term code health. He also authors and tweaks Spatie’s package skeletons and site tooling, so he’s equally comfortable shaping projects’ structure as he is implementing domain logic.
13 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Informatica (Software engineering) / Hogere opleiding Software engineer, Bachelor's degree, Informatica (Software engineering) / Hogere opleiding Software engineer at Karel de Grote Hogeschool
Github Skills (200)
tooling10
url-routing10
datetime10
printscreen10
sitemap10
package-management10
optimizers10
toolbox10
google-analytics10
image-processing10
testing10
data-manipulation10
command-line-interface10
databases10
bash10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
spatie/ssl-certificate
Jul 2016 - Jan 2023
A class to validate SSL certificates
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:74 releases, 8 reviews, 162 commits in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Freek primarily contributed to the development of the `spatie/ssl-certificate` repository, focusing on implementing and refining core functionalities related to SSL certificate validation. They added new classes, implemented methods to determine certificate details like domain, issuer, and expiration dates, and integrated certificate downloading from a URL. The user also improved the code by adding type hints and refactoring components for better readability.
letsencryptsslssl-certificatesphptls
spatie/ray
Nov 2020 - Dec 2022
Debug with Ray to fix problems faster
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:98 releases, 21 reviews, 694 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Freek's commits primarily involve modifications to the core codebase of the "spatie/ray" repository, including changes to source files like `Client.php`, `Timber.php`, and supporting classes. These changes focused on adding new features like timers and exception handling while refactoring existing code and making performance and styling improvements. The user's contributions appear to be focused on improving the debugging capabilities of the ray tool.
fixrayproblemsphpfaster
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