Willem Withagen is a seasoned CTO and entrepreneur with over three decades of hands-on experience in datacenters, networking and optical infrastructure, currently building energy-efficient facilities in Eindhoven. He combines deep systems and architecture insight with a keen commercial sense for B2B and B2C internet markets, having founded startups from ISP days through Astrape Networks. Willem is an active contributor to major open-source storage and database projects—helping make Ceph and RocksDB more portable and FreeBSD-friendly—demonstrating practical low-level C++ and cross-platform expertise. He blends strategic board and community roles with operational leadership, and brings an uncommon focus on sustainable, high-performance optical networking as the next step in internet evolution.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
ir, Electrical Engineering, ir, Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:105 reviews, 407 commits, 493 PRs in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Willem primarily contributed to bug fixes and code improvements within the Ceph storage platform. Their work focused on resolving compiler errors related to C++ code, especially with Clang, and addressing issues related to FreeBSD compatibility. The user also updated the code to address warnings and ensure correct functionality on various operating systems. The contributions span across different modules within the Ceph project, including core functionalities and utilities like dashboard and mirroring tools.
A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:8 commits, 14 PRs, 11 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Willem's contributions primarily focused on adapting the RocksDB codebase to support the FreeBSD operating system. They addressed compatibility issues related to standard library functions like `realpat()`, `abort()`, and `std::to_string()`. The changes included conditional compilation based on the OS, as well as utilizing FreeBSD-specific libraries such as `malloc_np.h`. Their work ensures that RocksDB can build and run correctly on the FreeBSD platform.
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