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Omer van Kloeten

Hey there 👋

I’m Omer, a 20+ year veteran software engineer with a wide range of experience in various roles in the industry, be it leading technology, teams or products. During my career, I worked at a bunch of startups (five of which exited) and a couple larger companies.

I’m an avid generalist with experience in backend, data, distributed systems, machine learning, frontend, UX, and more. I’m passionate about the intersection between engineering, product and management, and about socio-technical systems. I love blogging, public speaking, knowledge sharing and organizing communities around tech, and have been doing so since 2003.

I’m currently a Principal Engineer at Forter and having a blast at it!

Posts

Becoming a more self-directing Staff+ individual contributor

Iā€™ve spent the last five years of my career in Staff and Principal roles and have always hit a point where I feared inertia was taking over. In my last two roles, Iā€™ve found a way of refocusing the role that works for me, and LeadDev have kindly asked me to share it with the world. I sincerely hope this helps more people. Please do let me know if it helped you. Continue to read Becoming a more self-directing Staff+ individual contributor.
2023-03-13
1 min read
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A Fence, a Deviance and a Window

Imagine youā€™re joining a new role and see something that makes you go ā€œwtaf did they think when they did this?!ā€ - whatā€™s the first thing you do? If your answer is ā€œchange it,ā€ then chances are youā€™re wrong. To explain why, letā€™s visit a fence, a deviance and a window. As software engineers, our initial drive is to šŸ‘šŸ»solvešŸ‘šŸ»allšŸ‘šŸ»thešŸ‘šŸ»problemsšŸ‘šŸ»ā€¦ but what looks like a problem isnā€™t necessarily one. Chestertonā€™s Fence essentially says ā€œthereā€™s a fence, you donā€™t know why, donā€™t go removing it before understanding it.
2022-09-24
4 min read

Refactoring and Trust

Refactoring has many faces. When you start out, a fresh-faced developer, your only goal is to make your code Do The Thing. You forgot that semicolon or that loop was off-by-one and it took you the whole day to wade through those error messages to figure that stuff out and youā€™re on top of the world because you Fixed The Code and what do you mean change the code it WORKS NOW. Some years pass,
2021-08-05
4 min read
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Mac Tips, Tricks and Utilities

Iā€™m always looking for a way to get more out of my setup. In the past year, since moving from Windows to OSX, Iā€™ve accumulated some knowledge and utilities Iā€™d like to shareā€¦. You can read the copy of the original post, or if that goes down too, you can try the Wayback Machineā€™s copy of it. Context: This post was automatically imported from my old blog, which was originally hosted on Microsoftā€™s ASP.NET Community Blogs.
2012-11-19
1 min read

Parallelized Streams in Scala ā€“ Not What You Thought

I had a Stream of data coming in from an input source and had to do some heavily-CPU bound work. The code looked like this:ā€¦ You can read the copy of the original post, or if that goes down too, you can try the Wayback Machineā€™s copy of it. Context: This post was automatically imported from my old blog, which was originally hosted on Microsoftā€™s ASP.NET Community Blogs. When they shut it down, I dumped all of my old posts to Wordpress.
2012-08-23
1 min read

Selected Talks

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How to better understand business context as a StaffPlus engineer

Hosted June 2023 as part of the StaffPlus Broadcasts series
2023-06-07
1 min read
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Making an Impact as a Senior Individual Contributor - Panel

Hosted November 2022 at TechRadarCon'22
2022-11-14
1 min read
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Deleting Tests with Types

Presented March 2019 at the Ruby Underground meetup
2019-03-21
1 min read
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Type Your Business

Presented October 2018 at the Scala.io Conference in France
2018-10-31
1 min read
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Power Up Your Build

Presented April 2018 at Wix's Guild Day
2018-04-12
1 min read

Podcast Episodes

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Tech Career Stories - Omer van Kloeten (Hebrew)

I sat with Aya Shani and Eitan Masuary to chat about my career journey.
2022-11-14
1 min read
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The Interviews We Don't Do @ BarvazGumi (Hebrew)

I talked to Vicky Kalmanovich about the kinds of skills we look for in software engineers and the interviews we donā€™t do that would test them.
2022-09-07
1 min read
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Refactoring (and Observability) @ Reversim (Hebrew)

I talked to Ran Tavory and Ori Lahav about my philosophies around refactoring and observability.
2022-03-22
1 min read
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An episode about space @ NoTarbut (Hebrew)

I talked to Avi Etzioni and Gal Zellermayer about why open-plan offices should not be taken as the status quo.
2019-05-05
1 min read
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We can see your āœ³ļøāœ³ļøāœ³ļøāœ³ļøāœ³ļø šŸ±ā€šŸ’» @ CyberCyber (Hebrew)

I talked to Ido Kenan about my work on plaintextoffenders.com and bad password practices.
2019-05-02
1 min read