Wouter Verhelst
Senior Developer at Key Recruitment Group
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWouter Verhelst is a senior developer with 23 years of hands-on experience in GNU/Linux, open source, and networking, currently based in the Western Cape, South Africa. He combines deep Debian expertise—including long-term maintainership of the nbd project and contributions to the Open Lighting Architecture—with professional work on eID middleware and enterprise IT systems. Known for tenacity in solving complex system problems, he focuses on back-end robustness, test coverage, and maintainability, having added critical error handling and TRIM support to network block device software. Wouter runs a FOSS-focused consultancy background and has driven infrastructure improvements from Puppet-driven deployments to ZFS and advanced monitoring. He also contributes to community projects and events (long involvement with Debian and FOSDEM), bringing both production-grade skills and a tinkerer’s curiosity. An amateur musician as well, he blends disciplined engineering with creative problem-solving off the keyboard.
23 years of coding experience
Bachelor’s Degree, Information Technology, Bachelor’s Degree, Information Technology at Karel de Grote-HogeschoolBoekhouden-Informatica, Boekhouden-Informatica at St Lodewijk Secundaire HandelsschoolKunsthumaniora voor muziek en woord
Japanese, Dutch, English, French
Stackoverflow
1,282reputation
57kreached
49answers
13questions
Github Skills (25)
c-language10
c1110
makefile10
file-parsing10
network-programming10
c1710
parsing10
configuration-file10
error-handling10
configparser10
cprogramming-language10
testing9
storage9
gnu9
git7
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
NetworkBlockDevice/nbd
Dec 2008 - Jul 2022
Network Block Device
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 1269 commits, 42 PRs in 13 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Wouter's contributions primarily focused on improving the error handling and functionality of the network block device server. This included refining the configuration file parsing, handling potential issues with session configurations, and implementing the BLKDISCARD ioctl for TRIM operations. Furthermore, the user made changes to support named exports and the NBD_OPT_GO functionality, indicating a focus on enhancing the server's capabilities.
blockdevicenbdcstoragenetwork
OpenLightingProject/ola
Apr 2014 - Sep 2019
The Open Lighting Architecture - The Travel Adaptor for the Lighting Industry
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & System Maintainer
Back-end Developer & System MaintainerContributions:9 reviews, 32 commits, 5 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Wouter primarily focused on updating the project's source code to reflect changes in the Free Software Foundation's address and making other corrections to address linting issues. They updated the FSF address across multiple files. Furthermore, they added tests for core functionality and addressed compilation errors, indicating a focus on code quality and maintainability. The user also incorporated testing of the library, thus enhancing overall project reliability.
sacnprotobufc-plus-plusenttecstreaming-acn
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