Arnold Nefkens is a passionate, reliable Software & Operations Engineer with a broad experience in diverse IT Fields, to name a few:

  • DevSecOps (Unix / Linux)
  • PKI
  • Platform Architect
  • Security Officer (ISO 27001)
  • Team lead
  • Network Engineer
  • Continuous Integration / Continuous  Delivery
  • Apple Platform Developer
    • Swift
    • Objective-C

Starting the first of March 2023 he made the step to fully focus on working as freelancer under Nefkens ICT, the company he founded in 2010.

In the beginning of 2023 Arnold was working as a senior DevOps engineer for Solvinity. In this role he was part of the team responsible for one client: Logius.

Up until the end of 2022 Arnold worked for Pro Warehouse, one of two Apple Authorised Enterprise Resellers in the Netherlands.

While working for Pro Warehouse he started as an Apple Platform Developer where he wrote the Erase & Install Mac application.

Following the building of this macOS Application he was given the role of project manager for the development and maintaining of the backoffice application built in FileMaker Pro and managing the development processes for the website.  At that time the development was outsourced, later it was decided to start in-sourcing the development for both sites and backoffice application. He was given the responsibility of building the DevOps team and create a more sustainable and reliable platform.

During this time he setup and defined the architecture of a high-availability and high-performance platform, from where in a loosely coupled manner using RESTFull API’s the data is send to the sites as well as send back into the backoffice application. Initially the platform was run on Ubuntu (18.04 LTS), later the platform was migrated to run on FreeBSD instead, next to this major change in Operating System, the sites were migrated from running in a MySQL/PHP solution to a Server Side Rendered Application developed in GoLang. A very fast open-source programming language with built-in concurrency. Significant speed increases were realized.

For example:

Call PHP Go
Product Page 668.2 ms 103.7 ms
Categories 295.2 ms 13.7 ms

With the deployments of these applications he participated and developed the needed scripts to automate the deployment. When the team started a single deployment it took around 12 man hours to deploy a new version. After the automation the deployment took less then 3 minutes unattended.

Arnold was leading the DevOps team responsible in creating and maintaining the platform which is serving the webshops for Pro Warehouse.

Besides the day to day team lead role, Arnold helped Pro Warehouse gain the ISO certifications (ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001). In light of the ISO certifications Arnold full-filled the role or Security Officer.

Several other in-house applications are developed by Arnold:

  • Web based API Endpoint application for distribution in a narrow cast solution, written in GoLang.
  • A tvOS narrow cast application that can play endless movies, with automated download of new content when available.
  • A tvOS application capable in displaying Grafana dashboard or any other desired status page.

In the years before working at Pro Warehouse, Arnold worked as a lead developer on Apps for a number of Dutch Banks, an insurance company, an app accompanying a pain relief device, worked on the Hue app 2.x both for Philips Health and a number of premier soccer clubs. Many of these projects are executed using Agile/Scrum.

In the role of lead developer did Arnold coach less experienced developers, and was engaged in the architecture of the apps in the project. Before making the step into development, he worked as a full-time Apple Consultant.

As an example he worked on automating the deployment process of 450 Mac clients in network of over 6K clients. Thanks to the automation he reduced the process time from six days to one.

Arnold has followed a number iOS Boot camps at Big Nerd Ranch.

Arnold is well versed in Core Data, Core Location, Core Bluetooth. Core Foundation, most used Design patterns, OOP, TDD and the automation of the build process. (DevOps)

In the magazine Mac Tech he published an article on code signing and Continuous Integration.