Thijs Schreijer
FOSDEM 2026 at Vcare connect
Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThijs Schreijer is a pragmatic Head of Engineering with 14 years of hands-on experience building and operating API gateways, developer tools, and cloud-native platforms across roles from core engineer to solutions architect. He combines technical depth in Lua, OpenResty, Docker and CI/CD with product-facing skills—having led APIOps tooling at Kong to enable declarative, OpenAPI-driven deployments. A prolific open-source contributor, Thijs has improved core projects like Kong and lua-resty-http, and automated complex Docker builds for widely used distributions. He enjoys turning chaos into structure and thrives at the intersection of business and engineering, mentoring teams to solve difficult distributed-systems problems. An engaging speaker at conferences such as FOSDEM and API Days, he brings practical lessons from building load balancers, DNS clients and operator tooling. Colleagues value his straightforward, loyal approach and his knack for pragmatic, cross-platform build and deployment fixes that quietly improve developer experience.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Executive MBA Management and Economics, Executive MBA Management and Economics at University of Rochester - Simon Business SchoolMBA General Management, MBA General Management at Rochester - Nyenrode Executive MBABachelor Business Economics / Electronics, Bachelor Business Economics / Electronics at Saxion University of Applied Sciences
English, dutch (mother tongue), german (proficient), French, Spanish
Stackoverflow
388reputation
84kreached
15answers
7questions
Github Skills (73)
package-management10
testing10
windows10
command-line-interface10
http10
proxy10
file-operations10
proxy-pac10
lua10
http-client10
automation10
install-script10
build-automation10
kong10
rest-api10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
lunarmodules/Penlight
Jan 2013 - Aug 2022
A set of pure Lua libraries focusing on input data handling (such as reading configuration files), functional programming (such as map, reduce, placeholder expressions,etc), and OS path management. Much of the functionality is inspired by the Python standard libraries.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:62 reviews, 167 commits, 215 PRs in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Thijs primarily contributed to the Penlight Lua libraries by fixing bugs, adding new functionality, and improving code quality. The contributions focused on enhancing the path and template modules, as well as utils methods. They implemented fixes for file path resolution, environment variable handling, and shell command execution. The user added tests and improved existing documentation.
pythonfunctional-programmingconfiguration-filesclosureinput-data
lunarmodules/busted
Aug 2012 - Oct 2022
Elegant Lua unit testing.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 release, 21 reviews, 177 commits in 10 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Thijs primarily contributed to the project by modifying and adding unit tests, specifically focused on the Busted testing framework. They updated existing test files, added new test cases and fixed existing issues related to test execution. The changes reflect improvements in test coverage and the reliability of the testing process.
luatestingunitsnapshot-testingunit-testing
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