Nick Groenen
Staff Software Engineer at Castor
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Groenen is a Staff Software Engineer based in Amsterdam with over a decade of hands-on experience building resilient infrastructure and complex systems across the full software lifecycle. He has led platform and SRE efforts at Castor—driving a cloud migration of 45,000 MySQL schemas with sub-minute tenant downtime, replacing VM deployments with Kubernetes, and shaving MySQL recovery from 10+ hours to under 10 minutes—while also serving as interim CISO to scale security and compliance for major clinical clients. Currently he’s designing a domain-specific language and Rust-based runtime (WASM + gRPC) for clinical study protocols, blending language design, compiler work and distributed runtime engineering. A pragmatic engineer who oscillates between IC and management roles, he emphasizes automation, documentation and psychological safety to reduce toil and improve operational quality. Active in open source, he contributes to projects in Rust and Python, including documentation and backend improvements to the Errbot chatbot and tooling for exporting Obsidian vaults, reflecting an appetite for developer tooling and reproducible build workflows.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Radboud UniversityAtheneum Profiel Natuur en Techniek, Atheneum Profiel Natuur en Techniek at Arentheem College, Arnhem
English, Dutch, German
Stackoverflow
144reputation
3kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
markdown10
exports10
rust10
markdown-it10
obsidian10
python10
exporter10
documentation10
build-automation9
cli9
error-handling9
git9
slack-api6
chatops6
errbot6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
zoni/obsidian-export
Nov 2020 - Nov 2022
Rust library and CLI to export an Obsidian vault to regular Markdown
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:19 reviews, 91 commits, 115 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Nick focused on developing and improving the `zoni/obsidian-export` project, which exports Obsidian vaults to regular Markdown. The user implemented an MdBook generation script and precommit hook, demonstrating a focus on build and documentation workflows. Additionally, the user enhanced the library by re-exporting public items and incorporating features like custom filter functions within the `WalkOptions`. Furthermore, they added crucial features such as handling recursion limits and correcting relative links within embedded notes.
exporterobsidian-vaultrust-libraryexportrust
errbotio/errbot
Jun 2014 - May 2018
Errbot is a chatbot, a daemon that connects to your favorite chat service and bring your tools and some fun into the conversation.
Role in this project:Back-end & Documentation Engineer
Back-end & Documentation EngineerContributions:351 commits, 149 PRs, 269 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the project's documentation and made changes to the underlying code. They refactored the plugin documentation to use more modern approaches. Additionally, the user made code changes to Rocket, a dependency of the project.
chatopschatbotspythondevopsdaemon
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