Tom Lankhorst
Software Engineer at Apple
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Lankhorst is a software engineer based in Zurich with 12 years of experience building ML, robotics, and full‑stack systems, currently contributing at Apple after multi-year research engineering roles at ETH Zürich. He blends hands‑on robotics and control expertise (Master’s in Systems and Control) with practical backend and QA work—evident from open‑source contributions improving SQLite integration in Laravel and extending permission management in spatie/laravel-permission. Tom’s background spans embedded wireless sensor networks, computer vision for aerial robotics, and game UI/UX fixes for the popular OpenRCT2 project, showing a knack for both low‑level systems and user-facing improvements. He focuses on agentic loops and reinforcement learning, and also strengthens project usability through clear documentation—having set up Sphinx and improved docs for an optimal control codebase.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Systems and Control, Master's Degree, Systems and Control at University of TwenteTU Delft
English, Dutch, German
Stackoverflow
3,311reputation
183kreached
58answers
14questions
php
top-5%
xdebug
top-1%
Github Skills (44)
c-language10
sqlite10
sphinx10
laravel-mix10
testing10
permission10
c1110
ui-design10
xdebug10
laravel10
c1710
uid10
php10
front-end-development10
openrc10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
spatie/laravel-permission
Feb 2018 - Mar 2019
Associate users with roles and permissions
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 2 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Tom contributed to the `laravel-permission` repository by implementing new features, including methods to retrieve permissions by ID. They refactored code to allow retrieval of permissions via ID within user traits and added functionality for syncing permissions with string and numeric array inputs. The user also created tests and improved the test suite to validate the new functionality. Additionally, they refactored the permission:table command and converted it to permission:show and included StyleCI fixes.
securephppermissionpermissionslaravel
leggedrobotics/ocs2
Dec 2020 - Aug 2021
Optimal Control for Switched Systems
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:24 commits, 6 PRs, 5 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Tom's contributions center on enhancing the project's documentation. This includes setting up documentation tools such as Sphinx, configuring the build process, and converting documentation files from .dox to .rst format. They have also updated the documentation content with detailed explanations of the project's modules and installation instructions, with a focus on the user experience. Additionally, the user added links and corrected GitHub repository information, which improved usability.
roboticsmpcswitched-systemsoptimal-controlyarp
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.