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
toolbox10
optimizers10
google-analytics10
image-processing10
testing10
data-manipulation10
command-line-interface10
databases10
bash10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
spatie/laravel-searchable
Dec 2018 - Jan 2023
Pragmatically search through models and other sources
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 releases, 5 reviews, 84 commits in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Freek primarily focused on maintaining and improving the `laravel-searchable` library. Their contributions involved refactoring code, removing dead code, and fixing styling issues. They implemented features such as adding attributes to the constructor of search results and simplifying setup processes. The user also worked on custom type definitions within the library.
phpsearch-enginelaravelsearchsources
spatie/laravel-webhook-server
Jun 2019 - Jan 2023
Send webhooks from Laravel apps
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:46 releases, 9 reviews, 189 commits in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Freek's commits primarily involve modifications to the core functionality of the Laravel webhook server. They focused on refining the webhook execution flow by introducing retry mechanisms and implementing event dispatching for failure scenarios. The user also implemented additional features such as the handling of request timeouts and the use of backoff strategies to manage webhook retries. The contributions center around improving the reliability and robustness of the webhook server by adding exception handling and implementing event-driven processes.
laravelwebhooks
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