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

I’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, I’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

A Fence, a Deviance and a Window

Imagine you’re joining a new role and see something that makes you go “wtaf did they think when they did this?!” - what’s the first thing you do? If your answer is “change it,” then chances are you’re wrong. To explain why, let’s visit a fence, a deviance and a window. As software engineers, our initial drive is to 👏🏻solve👏🏻all👏🏻the👏🏻problems👏🏻… but what looks like a problem isn’t necessarily one. Chesterton’s Fence essentially says “there’s a fence, you don’t know why, don’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 you’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

Mac Tips, Tricks and Utilities

I’m always looking for a way to get more out of my setup. In the past year, since moving from Windows to OSX, I’ve accumulated some knowledge and utilities I’d like to share…. You can read the copy of the original post, or if that goes down too, you can try the Wayback Machine’s copy of it. Context: This post was automatically imported from my old blog, which was originally hosted on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Community Blogs. When they shut it down, I dumped all of my old posts to Wordpress. You can still check out the original blog on the Wayback Machine.

2012-11-19

1 min read

Parallelized Streams in Scala – 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:… You can read the copy of the original post, or if that goes down too, you can try the Wayback Machine’s copy of it. Context: This post was automatically imported from my old blog, which was originally hosted on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Community Blogs. When they shut it down, I dumped all of my old posts to Wordpress. You can still check out the original blog on the Wayback Machine.

2012-08-23

1 min read