Simon Heisterkamp
Data Engineer
Reykjavik, Iceland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Heisterkamp is a data engineer with 15 years of experience building reliable systems across defense, energy, and research domains, now based in Reykjavík and working freelance. He combines a strong academic foundation—a PhD in experimental high energy physics—with hands-on engineering roles from command-and-control systems at TERMA to wind turbine control at Vestas and principal specialist responsibilities at Delegate. Simon's work emphasizes maintainable, configurable back-end tooling, evidenced by contributions to the sqlparse Python library where he refactored the lexer and added syntax configurability and testing improvements to support diverse SQL dialects. He excels at translating complex, safety- and mission-critical requirements into production-ready data architectures and parsers. Colleagues describe him as a systems thinker who brings research rigor to pragmatic engineering trade-offs. His cross-domain experience makes him adept at tackling noisy, real-world data problems where correctness and configurability matter.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Natural Sciences, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Natural Sciences at Cambridge UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Experimental High Energy Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Experimental High Energy Physics at Copenhagen UniversityMaster of Science (MSc), Physics, Master of Science (MSc), Physics at Københavns Universitet
English, German, Danish, French, Icelandic
Github Skills (9)
sql-parser10
lexical-analysis10
parsing10
python10
pytest9
testing9
git-repository8
regular-expression8
github-repos8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
andialbrecht/sqlparse
Nov 2022 - Jan 2023
A non-validating SQL parser module for Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 9 commits, 8 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on improving the `sqlparse` library's flexibility and maintainability. Their contributions included refactoring the lexer, introducing configurable syntax options, and enhancing the testing framework. The changes demonstrate a focus on allowing users to customize the parsing behavior to suit different SQL dialects. They also made some changes regarding python 3.5 compatibility.
sql-parserpythonsql-databasesqlabstract-syntax-tree
mrmasterplan/EnvWatcher
May 2011 - Feb 2012
Contributions:36 commits in 8 months
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