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Jasper Schulte

Your next technical leader (CTO / VP of Engineering / Director of Engineering)

Who am I?

Professional

From 2005 until 2015 I ran my own development company. Since 2015 I have used that experience to help companies and development teams take ‘the next step’. The next step in delivering higher quality products, the next step in building high performing teams and the next step in creating a world class product company.

Personal

I’ve lived in several parts of the world and love to travel to all the other parts. In my free time my greatest passion is skydiving, and I try to travel as often as I can to the most exotic places to find a plane to jump from.

Back home, I love my city of Amsterdam, where I recently bought and completely renovated a house, and now I’m the happiest guy alive living there with my beautiful girlfriend and my hilarious and sweet two daughters.

What am I good at?

Building products

Building a digital product is hard. Over the years I’ve built multiple products and learned that your product requirements will change… daily. The success of your team and the product depends on whether you are able to adapt to these changes quickly enough.

Building teams

Over the years I’ve set up several teams and learned that a team’s success is determined by finding the balance between juniors and seniors, between specialists and generalists, between dreamers and soldiers and between optimists and realists.

Leading teams

I try to work for a team as a leader instead of as a boss. Standing next to your team, maximizing their potential, not being afraid to reveal your own vulnerability and always steering towards an ideal situation where your role is no longer needed.

Managing complex migration projects

Most projects have a (big) history and almost always some form of technical debt. Sometimes a solution for this technical debt is to migrate to a new framework/language/backend etc. My experience with complex migration projects has demonstrated that starting a new project from scratch in parallel is rarely the best course of action, as they often never finish. Instead, my approach involves delivering business value while gradually migrating towards the new standard.

Writing code that lasts

I’ve been around the block and have learned that you should write code imagining that you will have to come back to it 3 years later. At that point your nifty one liner will no longer make sense and your future self will hate you for it. The main goal of your code is to take any uninitiated reader by the hand and guide him through the logic.

Maximizing productivity

People want to have the feeling that they are making an impact. I feel my biggest duty is to maximize each team member’s productivity. Is someone doing a mundane task? Automate it. Is someone repeating a task often? Automate it. Is someone doing a task that is hard to do in a consistent way every time? Automate it. Developers should focus on what they are good at: Being creative and adding value. I’ll try to take away any other task.

My stack

  • Languages

    I work in JavaScript, preferably in TypeScript for the front- and backend. My use of JavaScript in the backend is a deliberate choice. Not because I believe JavaScript (in the form of Node.js) is the superior language for the backend featurewise. But the added benefit of having the same language in both front- and backend (in terms of recruitment, sharing logic and full stack mindset) far outweighs any other argument.

  • Frameworks

    I’ve learned that, although having experience with a certain framework definitely helps, a good programmer can be recognized not by his knowledge about a certain framework, but by his knowledge that transcends frameworks and can be applied anywhere. I have direct experience with React, Angular, Redux, MobX, GraphQL, React Native, Kubernetes, Express, Koa, Next.js etc. and I can pick up anything you’re working with right now.

  • Data storage

    Worked with (among others): MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Firebase

  • Mobile

    My experience with React Native has taught me that code development is only one small part of the app development process. I’ve tackled projects requiring creative solutions regarding Native API’s, performance optimization, iOS <-> Android issues, App store submissions, testing pipelines, OTAP environments etc.

  • DevOps

    DevOps is more and more becoming a household name in our development teams, for good reason. With microservice architectures and distributed responsibility every developer needs to be able to be in control of all operations. I believe tools which offer Infrastructure as Code (like Terraform or CloudFormation) provide a solution to make your infrastructure as transparent and manageable as any ordinary code repository.

  • CI / CD

    You need a CI / CD pipeline. Period. You can never start soon enough with automating your complete build- and test-pipeline from commit to running production code in any environment. To fully embrace the full-stack philosophy every developer needs to be able to move a request from idea all the way to production. I’ve set up numerous build and test streets on many different platforms (CircleCI, Codeship, GitLab, Jenkins etc.)

  • Testing

    You need tests, but foremost you need a testing strategy. There is no doubt that having a solid testing strategy makes your development team much more efficient, decisive when fixing and preventing bugs and confident when shipping new features. But testing also takes a lot of resources. I will help implement a strategy that fits the development team’s context and ambitions.

History

  • 2021-...

     

    Getir

    Role: Director of Engineering

  • 2019-2021

    SnappCar

    Role: CTO

    Responsible for the platform of SnappCar, serving a little shy of 1 million car owners and renters.

     

    2019-2021

  • 2018-2019

     

    TripAdvisor

    Role: Responsible for the Web Platform

    Responsible for moving TripAdvisor (+/- 500mil unique visitors a month) from a 20-year-old legacy platform to a modern and sustainable way of engineering their web platform.

  • 2016-2018

    GreenHome

    Role: CTO

    As CTO I was responsible for the performance of the development team. In three years, we went from a small hackers team to an extremely productive feature focused team, which was able to confidently release to production at any moment within minutes.

     

    2016-2018

  • 2005-2015

     

    Awesome Amsterdam

    Role: Co-Founder

    For 10 years, together with my 2 co-founders, we built a business serving clients like TomTom, Nike, Unilever, ING, ABN Amro, Rabobank, Sonos, Nikon, Heineken and BMW.

Testimonials

Jasper was great to work with and to have as part of our management team. Three things that I particularly valued from his time with us at SnappCar:
1) Ability to combine strategic thinking (what is best for the company in 2-3 years, what are our blind spots?) with pragmatism (what does that practically mean for what we need to do tomorrow and how do we do that in a time and cost efficient way?)
2) Building and engaging a product development team – he got great 360 feedback on listening and genuine care for people in his team; also he is able to co-create solutions to difficult problems together with the team, even if it could impact their careers quite a bit
3) Open, flexible and trustworthy as colleague – we gave him a rollercoaster ride and he was perfectly fine and happy with it; he is not afraid to constructively challenge and pull his weight in the management team, but also very welcoming, social and fun to hang around with (pro tip: ask about his hobbies).
In summary: please don’t put him on your shortlist (so he is free whenever I need a CTO again).

Erik RuttenCEO at SnappCar

Jasper brought a lot of energy and expertise to the role of CTO at SnappCar. First of all, he showed great strategic insights in tackling several complex and mission-critical topics. Second of all, he took great care of his team: Making sure that they were able to handle all the challenges that came with the global Covid pandemic, all the while helping the team perform better and making sure the quality of the platform improved with every step. Finally, he brought great energy to the company, combining hard work with fun downtime and a lot of laughs.

Victor van TolFounder SnappCar

Jasper is the 10x guy you want to contract. For three reasons: 1) excellent mentor for the team, backed by years of experience, 2) high quality output, with fast delivery, 3) outstanding technical knowledge, able to bring infrastructure and software architecture to higher quality standards. I would recommend any team to get Jasper on board for all three reasons above. On top of that, he brings great joy to the team and fosters collaboration. Genuinely nice guy to work with, looking forward to our next shared project!

Robin WoutersHead of Product & Design at Swapfiets

Conditions

  • Role

    CTO / Architect / Technical lead / Lead engineer

  • The ambition to really take the next step

    No messing around, no settling for second best. I’m looking for a place that is aiming high.

  • Availability

    4 days (Monday-Thursday)

  • Amsterdam

    Sorry, only positions in Amsterdam

Want to work with me?

Great! Contact me using the information found at the bottom of my site. As a minimum, please provide at least answers to the questions below. Any extra information you provide up front is welcome and will increase the chances of a successful collaboration.
  • What are you working on?

    What awesome product you are building? How far along you are right now?

  • What does the team look like?

    I’m very interested in the setup of the development team and also in the people I will be reporting to.

  • What is the current stack?

    Let me know what technologies / languages / frameworks you use right now and if there are ambitions to improve on this stack.

  • What are your ambitions?

    Let me know what your ambitions are for the upcoming year. What big milestones do you want me to focus on first?

  • What are your biggest challenges?

    How can I help you tackle them?

  • Where are you located?

    And tell me a little bit about your office.

NOTE: Please only contact me via email. I‘m contacted a lot about opportunities and a pre-screening via email is necessary. Again: The more detailed information you provide upfront, the bigger the chance I’ll want to have a coffee with you to discuss the opportunity further.

Public speaking

  • May 23-24

     

    CTO Craft (London, UK)

  • September 29

    AG TechFest (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

     

    September 29

  • June 28-29

     

    Techsylvania (Cluj, Romania)

  • November 22-23

    JS Poland (Warsaw, Poland)

     

    November 22-23

  • November 7-8

     

    CascadiaJS (Seattle, USA)

  • June 24-26

    Devoxx Poland Conference (Krakow, Poland)

     

    June 24-26

  • June 7

     

    Amsterdam JSNation Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

  • May 10

    NationJS Frontrunners Conference (Washington DC, USA)

     

    May 10

  • April 2-3

     

    Codemotion Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Contact

You can always contact me by using my first name + @jasperschulte.nl

My terms & conditions & resume

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