Summary
Peter Van Der Weerd is a seasoned software consultant and owner with over 30 years of hands-on experience and a decade-plus running his own freelance practice focused on search and information retrieval. He specializes in search engine architecture, Elasticsearch/Lucene, relevancy ranking and high-performance logging, routinely advising and delivering solutions for clients like Booking.com and LibertyGlobal. Known for pragmatic, creative problem solving, he builds robust systems that tolerate real-world messiness — from QR-code recovery for poor images to fuzzy FRBR deduplication across library collections. His background spans low-level systems and assembler on mainframes and embedded controllers to Java webservices and multithreaded search backends, giving him an unusually broad technical perspective. Based in Hoorn, Netherlands, he combines a "get it done" mentality with deep diagnostic skills and a focus on extracting maximum value from search technology.
10 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
2e graads, mathematics, physics, 2e graads, mathematics, physics at Ubbo Emmius (highschool teacher education)
AMBI (Software engineering)
technical physics, technical physics at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (4th year)
English