I'm Freek van de Ven, a software developer in the Netherlands. I work on backend systems in Java and Spring Boot; before that I spent four years building software across the whole stack.
I studied Software Engineering (HBO) at HAN University of Applied Sciences — a Java-oriented program that included a semester on software architecture.
From there I joined Iconica Development: about four years of full-stack work, with cross-platform apps in Flutter and Dart, backends in Django and JavaScript, CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Docker, and deployments on AWS and Google Cloud. For six months I led a development team of four.
The move to backend Java was deliberate: I completed a Java masterclass with Spring Boot at Quintor and hold the Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 21 certification. The mobile years still pay off — I know what the app on the other end of an API needs.
Off the keyboard I throw darts. The diagram on the homepage is a dartboard's wire, drawn to scale.
