Toon Claes
Senior Backend Engineer, Gitaly at GitLab Inc.
Belgium
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolToon Claes is a Senior Backend Engineer with 16 years of experience, currently building Gitaly at GitLab from Belgium. He combines deep backend expertise in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL with systems-level C and embedded Linux experience, having worked on Git internals, git clone improvements, and memory-leak fixes. At GitLab he has contributed across Geo and Omnibus packaging, improving distributed features, health checks, and deployment tooling. An active open-source contributor, he also enhances developer tooling and UX—from elisp package management and Oh My Zsh to responsive web work on git-scm.com—reflecting a pragmatic full-stack mindset. Unusually, his background spans both embedded payment device security and large-scale web platform engineering, giving him a rare cross-domain perspective on reliability and performance.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master, Electronics - ICT, Master, Electronics - ICT at Katholieke Hogeschool KempenHigh School, Industrial Sciences, High School, Industrial Sciences at WICO - Campus TIO
Dutch, English
Stackoverflow
1,128reputation
235kreached
16answers
7questions
Github Skills (60)
ruby-rails10
git10
docker10
mson10
website-development10
gitlab-omnibus10
package-management10
scripting10
css10
command-line-interface10
responsive-design10
rails10
c1110
dockers10
emacs-lisp10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
gitlabhq/gitlabhq
Sep 2016 - Sep 2019
GitLab CE Mirror | Please open new issues in our issue tracker on GitLab.com
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:433 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Toon primarily contributed to the GitLab CE repository by addressing minor code issues, including fixing typos and adding parameters to JSON responses. They also refactored code related to shard health checks and the RepositoryCheck::DispatchWorker, improving the system's ability to check repositories per shard. Furthermore, they enhanced the system by enabling project owners to manage forking relations through the API and cleaning up LFS objects when creating fork relations, indicating an understanding of the project's codebase.
gitlab-apinew-issuestrackerrailsgitea
git/git-scm.com
Jan 2017 - Apr 2025
The git-scm.com website. Note that this repository is only for the website; issues with git itself should go to https://git-scm.com/community.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 6 PRs, 57 comments in 8 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Toon primarily focused on enhancing the git-scm.com website's user interface. Their contributions involved implementing responsive bar graphs using HTML `<progress>` elements and CSS grid for improved mobile viewing. They also added and updated the content of the site related to the Git project, including documentation and updated links to external resources. They also incorporated testing to validate the responsive design changes across different screen sizes.
git-scmscm
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