Joël Harkes
Tech Lead - Software Engineer (DAM) at Frontify
Biel/Bienne, Bern, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoël Harkes is a hands-on tech lead and software engineer with over a decade of experience building and modernizing scalable SaaS platforms, currently leading the Digital Asset Management team at Frontify. He blends deep backend expertise in C#/.NET and Laravel/PHP with frontend React/TypeScript skills and strong DevOps practice across Kubernetes, Azure and Google Cloud to deliver high-performance features and resilient infrastructure. As an engineering manager he pairs coaching, hiring and metrics-driven process improvements (DORA/SPACE) with C-level reporting and compliance work (ISO/ISAE), ensuring teams stay fast and auditable. Joël is an active open-source contributor—having improved core parts of ServiceStack and Laravel’s database components—demonstrating a knack for digging into framework internals to unblock product work. He’s known for solving practical bottlenecks (e.g., massively speeding up and scaling Frontify’s upload pipeline) while keeping one foot in code to avoid becoming a blocker. Curious and polyglot by nature, he frequently reads dependency source, publishes packages, and stays sharp on algorithms through LeetCode and Advent of Code.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
HAVO Natuur en techniek, HAVO Natuur en techniek at Driestar CollegePropedeuse (cum laude) Informatica (IT), Propedeuse (cum laude) Informatica (IT) at De Haagse Hogeschool / The Hague University of Applied Sciences
Dutch, English, French, German
Stackoverflow
11,325reputation
4.4mreached
351answers
30questions
php
top-5%
dependency-injection
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
browser
top-1%
datetime
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
database-migrations10
application-framework10
laravel-mix10
app-framework10
databases10
schema-design10
browser10
asp-net-core10
laravel10
webservice10
sql-server10
php10
database-design10
db-schema10
database-schema10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
laravel/framework
Feb 2019 - Dec 2021
The Laravel Framework.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 10 commits, 27 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Joël primarily contributed to the Laravel framework's back-end functionality. They focused on fixing bugs related to caching, database schema generation, and linting issues. A significant portion of their work involved improving the SQL Server database integration, including adding tests and addressing issues with default constraints and pagination. These contributions demonstrate their proficiency in database interactions and the framework's core logic.
laravel-frameworklaravelphpframework
ServiceStack/ServiceStack
Sep 2016 - Mar 2017
Thoughtfully architected, obscenely fast, thoroughly enjoyable web services for all
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 9 PRs, 22 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Joël focused on enhancing the core functionality and extensibility of the ServiceStack framework. Their contributions included adding overwriteable methods for session value persistence within the authentication provider and making the container getter override-able. They also worked on opening up the Funq container for extensibility, fixing a build error, and making the ServiceController extensible. Furthermore, the user implemented a CacheClientPrefixer and added documentation for the ServicestackHost and RequestContext classes.
actionscriptcsvxmlnet-frameworkframework
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.