About Me

I am Simon Karman MSc. I am a cloud consultant and hobbyist game developer and a former student at the Utrecht University. I currently work at Xebia Cloud.

I love to take the lead in the architecture and development of new products and features. While doing so, I believe that developers should all apply a modern way of working. Examples are: automated testing, boy scout principle, pull requests, api first, event driven, developer hapiness, and failing fast. I personally advocate for these (and more) practices whenever I can, and I'm always open to learn more.

Development culture is key. I personally get excited from ensuring developer ergonomics. This includes build, improving, and sharing: command line tools, infrastructure libraries, and application libraries.

We as developers should fully embrace CICD. It enables a team to move approvals away from a personal responsibility, to make the CICD process and automated testing the approval process itself. If your pipeline reaches the 'deploy to production'-stage, you should feel confident to release.

It is important to constantly challenge yourself, reflect and to strive for doing better. Do achieve this I believe it is important to share our knowledge and experience. For this reason I love open source, and also love to share my own experiences and stories. I can give presentations about development best practices or host sessions about technical topics.

A bit of history

Since primary school I have been developing games. It all started with creating board games for my friends. In the last years on primary school I started programming some computer games for my friends as well. At this point I already enjoyed creating games more than I did playing them. And since I like playing games so much, this means a lot!

The two games I played most are Call of Duty 4 and Minecraft, both on PC. I did spent a lot of time with both games mainly because of the modding and mapmaking communities they contain. I have made my own contributions to these communities, especially in content creation.

Like programming I also love mathematics. My passion for finding simple, generic, and maintainable solutions concerning mathematical and architectural challenges and my love for creating and playing boardgames is what formed the basis of my interest in the field of Software Architecture and Game Technology.

Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Bachelor)

In June 2014 I graduated at the University of Applied Siences in Amsterdam. The field of this bachelor was Informatics with Game Technology as specialization. During this study I did two amazing internships. First one at Sticky Studios in Utrecht and the second one at Tingly Games in Rotterdam.

Utrecht University (Master)

In September 2014 I started studying at the Utrecht University where I finished the two year Master’s programme: Game and Media Technology (GMT). The Master’s programme focussed on the technological aspects of gaming and multimedia in the context of computer science. Geometric Algorithms was the course that fascinated me the most. After writing my master thesis on 'Generating Sokoban Levels that are Interesting to Play using Simulation' the university awarded me a masters degree giving me the title Master of Science.

During my master at the Utrecht University I joined Study association Sticky. Sticky is a non-profit organisation that organises a variety of activities for her members, computer science and information science students at Utrecht University. As Commissioner of External Relationships I was responsible for the income during the year 2016-2017. That year I acquired new sponsors, kept in contact with existing sponsors and planned study, job and company related events for her members. As board member I was also responsible for several committees and organising activities for the members of Sticky.

Quintor

From September 2018 until September 2021 I worked for Quintor as an IT Consultant. I started with a 2 month masterclass learning the basis of working at Quintor. After this masterclass I started at ING Bank to work on a compensation system of the ING Service Points throught the country. After ING I started in June 2019 at Tikkie (part of ABN Amro Bank) to work as AWS Cloud Engineer, TypeScript Programmer, and Java Backend Developer to build the business to consumer side of the Tikkie platform.

Xebia Cloud

Since October 2021 I am working for Xebia Cloud (formerly known as Binx.io). Our aim is to make every organization cloud native. As a cloud consultant I use my expertise to ensure our clients make effective use of cloud solutions ranging from serverless applications, to apis, to CICD pipelines, and to infrastructure as code solutions. I focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I started this journey helping Felyx, by building and migrating to a new landing zone for the Kubernetes workloads on GCP using Terraform and GKE. After this I help DPG Media, TuneIn, and ABN AMRO Clearing Bank.