Tom Baeyens
Co-founder And CTO at Soda
Antwerp Metropolitan Area Belgium
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Baeyens is a seasoned technology founder and CTO with 13 years of entrepreneurial and open-source leadership in workflow and data tooling, currently leading Soda to make data quality observable and actionable. He founded and led multiple BPM projects—jBPM, Activiti and Effektif—and later built RockScript for resilient microservice integration, showing a consistent focus on durable, auditable execution engines. As a hands-on engineer he contributes to prominent open-source platforms like Camunda/Activiti, specializing in workflow engine internals, database schema migrations and history/variable handling across multiple RDBMS. Tom blends product vision with deep backend expertise in Java and data pipelines, evidenced by core contributions to soda-core such as ANTLR parser regeneration and schema validation improvements. Based in Antwerp, he pairs architectural leadership with practical implementation, often solving thorny cross-cutting concerns like long-running execution persistence and multi-database compatibility. Colleagues and users know him for turning complex orchestration and data quality problems into pragmatic, production-ready systems.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Master Computer Science, Master Computer Science at KU Leuven
Github Skills (30)
data-quality10
python10
data-engineering10
testing10
processmaker10
databases10
workflow-engine10
java10
javas10
sql10
bpmn10
database-design10
db-schema10
database-schema10
database-management10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
sodadata/soda-core
Apr 2022 - Aug 2022
:zap: Data quality testing for the modern data stack (SQL, Spark, and Pandas) https://www.soda.io
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:1 release, 78 reviews, 33 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to data quality testing and data pipeline related tasks within the `soda-core` repository. Their work included regenerating ANTLR parsers, which is part of the core codebase for defining data quality rules. They refactored check identity to hash of definition, fixing and improving the schema validation features. They also added tests to verify numeric metrics on text columns. This indicates a focus on the core functionalities of the data quality tool, and in particular its schema validation and test samples.
pythondata-observabilitydbtdata-integritymonitoring
Activiti/Activiti
Sep 2012 - Nov 2012
Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It's open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:51 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits primarily involve modifications to the Activiti engine, focusing on enhancements and fixes related to historic variable instances and deployment categories. They updated the database upgrade scripts for supporting different databases (DB2, H2, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, MSSQL), indicating a focus on improving the history-related functionality and the compatibility of the process engine across varied database systems. Additionally, the user contributed to refactoring the variable handling and adding functionality to deployment, ensuring that process definitions are correctly categorized.
business-process-managementprocess-managementactivition-serverjava-application
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