Simon Karman

Cloud Consultant and Game Developer

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.

Experience

AWS Cloud Consultant at ABN Amro Clearing
apr 2023 to now
AWS Cloud Consultant at TuneIn
jun 2022 to mar 2023
AWS Cloud Consultant at DPG Media
mar 2022 to jun 2022
GCP Cloud Consultant and CI/CD Engineer at Felyx
okt 2021 to mar 2022
Cloud Consultant at Xebia Cloud
okt 2021 to now
AWS Cloud and Java/NodeJS Backend Engineer at Tikkie
jun 2019 to sep 2021
Software Engineer at ING
dec 2018 to may 2019
Consultant at Quintor
sep 2018 to sep 2021
Board Member at Study Association Sticky
sep 2016 to sep 2017
Game Programmer at Tingly Games
jun 2015 to aug 2015
Internship at Tingly Games
feb 2014 to jun 2014
Game Programmer at Sticky Studios
apr 2012 to jan 2013
Internship at Sticky Studios
sep 2011 to jan 2012

Education

Utrecht University (UU) - Master, Game And Media Technology
2014 to 2018
Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) - Game Technology
2010 to 2014

Languages and Environments

Pulumi, Github Actions and Go
2022 to 2023
Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Build, and Terraform
2021 to 2022
React, Next, Styled Components, TypeScript, and Redux
2021 to 2021
TypeScript, AWS CDK, npm, and CloudFormation
2020 to now
Vue, Nuxt, and TailwindCSS
2018 to 2021
Serverless, JavaScript, Webpack, Jest, and CloudFormation
2018 to 2020
Java, Kotlin, Spring, Kafka, and Axon in Intellij IDEA
2018 to 2019
HTML5, jQuery and Javascript in Visual Studio Code
2014 to 2019
C# in the Unity Game Engine
2011 to 2018
PHP / MySQL in NotePad++
2011 to 2017
C++ in Visual Studio (GLUT, Bullet and OpenCV)
2014 to 2015
Java, JSP, Hibernate and Spring in NetBeans
2013 to 2013
C++ in the Irrlicht Game Engine
2013 to 2013
C# in Visual Studio using XNA
2010 to 2012
Action Script 3.0 in FlashDevelop using Flixel
2010 to 2011
Java in NetBeans
2010 to 2010
Visual Basic for Excel in Excel
2009 to 2009
Game Maker Language (GML) in Game Maker 7.0
2003 to 2009

Development Tools

Google Cloud Platform (GCP Cloud)
2021 to 2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS Cloud)
2019 to now
Jira - Project Management
2019 to now
Postman - API Development
2018 to 2021
Linux / MacOS - ZSH, Bash, Ubuntu
2018 to now
Jenkins, Fortify, and SonarQube
2018 to 2021
Git on GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab
2012 to now
TortoiseHg Mercurial on BitBucket.org
2012 to 2018
TortoiseSVN SubVersion
2011 to 2012