Started at Nedap Healthcare in 2014 with the drive to build our own products. During that time, I fulfilled various roles within the organization. I became heavily involved in Kotlin and Enterprise Java.
Teamlead Tech-Team Backoffice
Within the back-office group, I contributed to a change in team organization. I took the initiative to come up with a plan to modernize the existing technology stack, moving from an old JBoss server with Java 8 to the latest Wildfly platform with Java 17 in Docker. Based on that plan, I built a new team to execute it. We transitioned from a group of individuals to teams with a clear focus.
Teamlead GGZ
From 2016 onwards, I spearheaded efforts with the commercial team to adapt our software suite for a new market segment: Mental Healthcare. My responsibility was to make the "Nedap ONS" suite suitable for the new market segment, which was already widely used in the elderly care market.
Over four years, our team ensured Nedap’s growth from an unknown player in the market to a suite that is satisfactorily used by top-10 mental Healthcare institutions in the country. To facilitate the transition for large institutions, we developed data-conversion tooling in Kotlin with Spring Boot.
Learning Experience
It was a hectic time. As newcomers to a different market, much was unknown, and we had a lot to learn about what makes mental healthcare organizations unique. Commercially, things were going well, which put quite some pressure on delivering good software. In a limited time, I built a team capable of developing features specific to the mental healthcare market across multiple products. This required extensive internal and external work on planning, expectations, and coordination with other product teams. The data-conversion tooling had to facilitate the import of 20-year-old datasets with millions of records within a very tight time window (during office hours) without causing user disruption. We faced multiple performance challenges during this process.
JBoss Migration
The 14-year-old backend system was hosted on an old application server. Upgrading to a newer JBoss version was one of my main projects. It was a large codebase (~2 million lines of code) with dependencies on old, unsupported libraries. This migration was successfully completed and phased out for over 1000 care organizations.
Learning Experience
In an old codebase, you encounter unforeseen issues that you can only partially prepare for. Many issues require coming up with new solutions, demanding a lot of perseverance. Because deploying a different application server is very risky, I implemented mechanisms for phased deployment and, more importantly, rollback capabilities. The energy required to drive this project forward was the motivation to increase "developer happiness" with a more modern technology stack.