Nick Goossens
Senior Backend Engineer at DuckDuckGo
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Goossens is a Senior Backend Engineer with 13 years of professional experience and over 15 years coding, now building resilient backend systems at DuckDuckGo from Western Cape, South Africa. He specializes in complex, production-grade distributed systems, having designed Linux hypervisor scheduling and placement optimizations for AWS EC2 T instances and led capacity and scaling improvements. His background spans embedded device firmware and productization—developing ARM Linux-based devices and marine monitoring systems—through to cloud microservices in Go, Erlang, Scala and Java. An avid systems tinkerer, he has contributed to the open-source OPC UA implementation open62541, improving OS X portability, build systems and bindings for Python/Lua. Nick pairs deep code-level troubleshooting with mentorship and operational discipline, regularly producing measurable performance and reliability gains. He holds a BSc and BSc Hons (Cum Laude) in Computer Science and Information Systems, reflecting a strong academic foundation beneath practical engineering.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Cum Laude), Computer Science & Information Systems, Physics, BSc (Cum Laude), Computer Science & Information Systems, Physics at Nelson Mandela University
Github Skills (10)
c1710
macos10
build-system10
cmake10
c1110
industrial-automation10
opc-ua10
unit-testing9
python7
lua7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
open62541/open62541
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
Open source implementation of OPC UA (OPC Unified Architecture) aka IEC 62541 licensed under Mozilla Public License v2.0
Role in this project:
Back-end & System Engineer
Back-end & System EngineerContributions:5 commits, 8 PRs, 30 comments in 3 days
Contributions summary:Nick's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the compilation and portability of the OPC UA library, specifically targeting OS X. They addressed OS X specific code, including modifications to network layer and compiler flags. Furthermore, the user updated unit tests for better compatibility and improved build system integration, and made updates to accommodate Python and Lua bindings. The work included modifications to compilation scripts, and enhancements to type handling functions.
iectsnlicensediec-62541opcua
ngoossens/open62541
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
Contributions:28 pushes, 22 branches in 19 days
licensediec-62541iecstatic-linkingcommunication-stack
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