Marcel Wouters is a senior software engineer and seasoned CTO-level technologist based in The Hague with 14 years of experience designing cloud-native architectures and leading engineering teams. He blends hands-on back-end expertise—demonstrated through contributions to notable PHP projects like Bolt CMS and the Exact Online client—with strategic platform work as a software and platform architect. Marcel has a strong track record in startups and scale-ups, holding roles from founder/owner to CTO and platform architect, where he translated product needs into resilient, maintainable systems. He is comfortable across storage lifecycles, search improvements, API client design and serialization, often refactoring core components to improve flexibility and correctness. His background as an entrepreneur and board member means he pairs technical depth with product and business awareness. Expect a pragmatic engineer who still dives into core code to shape system behavior rather than just spec it from the top.
Bolt is a simple CMS written in PHP. It is based on Silex and Symfony components, uses Twig and either SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:74 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Marcel primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Bolt CMS, implementing and modifying storage lifecycle events related to saving and deleting content, which involved changes to core Bolt files, including `Storage.php`, `StorageEvent.php`, and `StorageEvents.php`. They also refactored code to handle HTML snippets and enhance the search functionality with a weighted search algorithm. Additionally, the user made minor improvements, such as fixing typos and incorporating dynamic routing features, which improved the core system.
Contributions summary:Marcel primarily focused on enhancing the existing PHP client library for Exact Online. Their contributions include adding support for JSON serialization, explicit subscription management, and more flexible system filter options. Furthermore, they implemented new features such as gender and title information for contact objects, alongside several refactoring efforts involving updates to core classes. These changes suggest a strong understanding of the library's architecture and the Exact Online API.
php-clientclient-libraryphpphp-library
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Marcel Wouters - Senior Software Engineer at Thriving Things