Oscar te Giffel®

Résumé

Oscar te Giffel.

Freelance Tech Lead · Systems Developer

Hi, I'm Oscar — Freelance Tech Lead through Createch and currently senior frontend at DPG Media. Previously IT Tech Lead at Pixcelium (MedTech compliance SaaS) and Chapter Lead Frontend at HeadFWD.

Eight years shipping systems, from Vanilla JS → React, PHP → Kotlin, monolith → microservices, CRUD forms → xState machines. I care about more than the stack: aligning teams and teaching best practices. Depth in frontend architecture, Domain-Driven Design, TypeScript. Next step: principal / staff work — technical strategy and mentoring.

Experience.

2024 — Present · freelance via Createch

Senior Frontend Engineer · DPG Media

Brought in to move DPG's frontend off Vanilla JS onto React + Next.js. Pushing the org from components-as-a-service to components-as-a-product. Architecture direction plus hands-on delivery.

  • Built a video player component library end-to-end as the flagship product.
  • Page-by-page migration to Next.js — no big-bang rewrite, no feature freeze.
  • Set up CI/CD and pushed Domain-Driven Design on the Kotlin services behind it.
  • Coached juniors through review, not rewrite — from ticket-takers to slice owners.

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Kotlin · DDD · CI/CD

Jul 2024 — Feb 2026

IT Tech Lead · Pixcelium

Early-stage MedTech compliance SaaS. Owned technical direction in a regulated, slow-moving domain — the product made it simple, clear, and fast without slowing the customer's work.

  • Set the architecture from zero — stack choices, compliance tooling, hiring input.
  • Product decisions lived between code and regulation.
  • Shipped an MVP to MedTech customers; the stack held through the first compliance-audited releases.

TypeScript · React · JVM · Node.js

Jun 2021 — Jan 2023 · via HeadFWD

Senior Frontend Developer · KVK

Senior lead on seven priority government services used by every business in the Netherlands. Owned frontend architecture, grew the team, pushed back on anything that broke accessibility.

  • Introduced Domain-Driven Design boundaries; kicked off monolith → micro-frontends.
  • Modelled multi-step form flows as xState finite state machines — killed whole classes of submission bugs.
  • Led a team of three frontend engineers and sat on the hiring panel.

TypeScript · React · Redux · xState · DDD · Jest · GitLab · SonarQube

Feb 2021 — Aug 2023

Chapter Lead Frontend · Senior Frontend Engineer · HeadFWD

Chapter Lead across HeadFWD's frontend engineers alongside senior client delivery. Grew the technical bar of the discipline through chapter days, internal talks, and hiring input.

  • Chapter Lead — technical growth, chapter days, internal talks, standards across projects.
  • Recruitment — owned technical assessment of frontend candidates; aligned interviewers.
  • Innovation consultant — technical vision and hands-on work on client innovation projects.

TypeScript · React · Next.js · DDD

Feb 2023 — Present · via HeadFWD

Senior Fullstack Developer · Polariks

Data platform giving greenhouse growers insight into their cultivation. Improved both the Scrum process and the product's frontend and BFF.

  • Strengthened the Scrum process — worked with the team to find and remove bottlenecks.
  • Built frontend and BFF in TypeScript + React over NestJS GraphQL; added caching and optimised GraphQL relations for heavy data aggregation.
  • Coached junior developers.

React · TypeScript · NestJS · GraphQL · Apollo · MUI · InfluxDB · Kubernetes · Terraform

Mar 2021 — Jun 2021 · via HeadFWD

Senior Frontend Developer · Deloitte

Helped digitise Deloitte's gamified escape rooms — used to raise awareness on privacy, GDPR, and password hygiene.

  • Conceived, designed, and built several browser games (memory, mastermind variants) in Next.js, TypeScript, React, TailwindCSS.

Next.js · React · TypeScript · TailwindCSS

Jul 2019 — Jan 2020 · via HeadFWD

Senior Frontend Developer · Yokogawa

Market leader in process-industry technology. Set up and led the frontend for the control screens used on plant devices and computers.

  • Rebuilt a large part of the application, fully replacing the legacy Django frontend.
  • Gathered and translated requirements with the product owner and business analysts.
  • Handled browser compatibility on outdated devices — dropped to vanilla JS where needed — and helped refine the screen designs.

TypeScript · React · Styled Components · jQuery · SASS · Agile

Sep 2016 — Jul 2019

Fullstack Developer · MoneyMonk

Early engineer at an accounting SaaS; came back later to lay a fresh frontend foundation while the product crossed startup → scale-up.

  • Migrated the frontend to React + Redux + TypeScript + Tailwind + React Query, module by module.
  • Moved LAMP onto Docker + Kubernetes; wrote a Spring app to manage the cluster; led the backend shift to Kotlin.
  • Built Touchpoint, an internal ticketing app, end-to-end with the team.
  • Moved a React Native mobile app off native modules and added Redux for a large efficiency gain.
  • Standardised tooling and coding guidelines so new hires ramped fast.

PHP · React · React Native · Redux · Node.js · Kotlin · Spring · Docker · Kubernetes · MySQL · Redis

Skills.

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Kotlin, Java, Python, Go, Rust, Zig, PHP, HTML, (S)CSS / SASS
Frontend
React (Next.js, Remix, Gatsby, Astro), React Native, Vue (Nuxt), Svelte (SvelteKit), Storybook
State & Data
TanStack Query, Redux, Zustand, xState, Apollo, GraphQL, React Hook Form
Styling & UI
TailwindCSS, Styled Components, Radix, MUI, shadcn/ui
Backend
Spring Boot, Ktor, Quarkus, NestJS, Express, Laravel, Django. JUnit, Mockito, Hibernate
Architecture
Domain-Driven Design, Clean & Hexagonal Architecture, Event Sourcing, CQRS, Microservices, Serverless, REST, HATEOAS, gRPC, Finite State Machines, TDD
Testing
Vitest, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, React Testing Library
Platform
Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, GitOps, CI/CD (GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
Data
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, InfluxDB, Kafka
Tooling
Vite, Webpack, pnpm, Bun, Git, Figma

Projects.

Laravel · Vue · React Native

Chewpy

A guide for people who want to eat vegetarian but don't know where to start. Built the REST API and CMS feeding the web app and two mobile clients; set up the server running the core application.

Education.

Education

  • BSc Informatica — Software EngineeringHogeschool Leiden · 2013 — 2018
  • Minor — Philosophy, World Religions, SpiritualityHogeschool Utrecht · 2017 — 2018

Training

  • Principal Dev — tech leadership & development process2024
  • Total TypeScript — Matt Pocock
  • Epic React, Testing JavaScript, Advanced React Patterns — Kent C. Dodds
  • UNLP · Mannenkracht — personal development

Languages

  • Dutch (native) · English (fluent) · Japanese (learning — JLPT N5)