Merijn Verstraaten
Senior Developer at Eaglescience Software
Mijdrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMerijn Verstraaten is a Senior Developer with 15 years of experience blending deep academic training (PhD in Computer Science) with hands-on systems and high-performance engineering. He specializes in programming languages, compilers, multi-threaded runtimes, distributed systems and performance engineering, and has recently worked on graph processing and GPU programming. Merijn is an active contributor to prominent Haskell projects including GHC and Cabal, and has improved Yesod's persistent library with practical SQLite enhancements and migration robustness. Known for making “impossible” performance problems tractable, he pairs formal CS theory with pragmatic engineering to realise high-level ideas efficiently. Based in the Netherlands, he champions functional programming and believes software engineering needs more rigorous engineering discipline. A lesser-known strength is his ability to move between low-level runtime fixes (e.g., GHC RTS crash fixes) and high-level DSL/compiler design, bridging research and production.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Amsterdam
Dutch, English, German
Github Skills (21)
database-migrations10
sqlite10
build-system10
compiler-design10
sql10
ghc10
cabal10
database-migration10
haskell10
c119
database-design9
c179
type-system9
version-control9
optimization8
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
haskell/cabal
Aug 2012 - Sep 2018
Official upstream development repository for Cabal and cabal-install
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 26 commits, 11 PRs in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Merijn primarily contributed to the Cabal build system, focusing on improving its functionality and stability. Their contributions included fixing issues related to configure script location detection, and modifying the argument filtering and flag normalization for GHC compilation. Furthermore, they added and updated flags to support different GHC versions. Their work demonstrates a strong understanding of the Cabal build process and Haskell compilation.
hackagecabalhaskellupstream
yesodweb/persistent
Jul 2019 - Mar 2021
Persistence interface for Haskell allowing multiple storage methods.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 21 commits, 20 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Merijn primarily contributed to the persistent-sqlite module, implementing features related to database interactions within the Yesod framework. Their work included enhancements for composite primary key migrations, enabling the collection of more detailed performance statistics, and exposing the raw SQLite database pointer for advanced use cases. The user also addressed several bugs and improved the test suite to ensure the correct behavior of database migrations and foreign key constraints. Further improvements included adding pool creation functions, updating the SQLite amalgamation version, and resolving various issues.
haskellpersistencestorage
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