Samuel van Eck
samuelvaneck
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Currently @ Mobility Investment Group

Samuel van Eck

Software engineer working on the Reisbalans platform in Amersfoort. Rails, bug-hunting, and the DevOps glue that keeps it running.

<Rails /> / JavaScript / DevOps

View Projects About me

About me Engineer with a sysadmin past — I ship features, hunt down bugs, and keep the Rails foundations solid at Mobility Investment Group.

~ /about/samuel.md

Hey, I'm Samuel — a software engineer at Mobility Investment Group in Amersfoort, working on Reisbalans, their mobility platform. Day to day I ship new features, hunt down bugs, and keep the foundations solid: Rails upgrades, dependency hygiene, and performance tuning — alongside about 25 other developers in a SCRUM setup.

The part of the job I enjoy most is bug fixing. There's something quietly satisfying about diving into unfamiliar code, pulling on a thread, and figuring out exactly why something behaves the way it does. That same curiosity is what carried me from sysadmin work — I started in IT back in 2008 — into web development at Codaisseur in 2016, and it's still the thing that keeps me reaching for the next problem.

Outside the editor I'm a husband and a dad of two, living in Amersfoort. This site is just my corner of the internet — somewhere to point to the things I build. Right now my main goal is simple: keep growing in the role I'm in.

GitHub LinkedIn
18+ Years in tech
9+ Years shipping software
2 Kids deployed to prod

Stack

Backend
Ruby on Rails Ruby PostgreSQL REST APIs Sinatra
Frontend
JavaScript React HTML CSS / Sass
DevOps / Infra
Docker CI/CD Linux Nginx Shell scripting
Tooling & learning
Git Python Go

Selected projects A mix of work, side projects and small experiments — what I've built and what I'm building now.

$ reisbalans --ship

Reisbalans @ Mobility Investment Group Day job

I'm a software engineer at Mobility Investment Group in Amersfoort, working on Reisbalans — their mobility platform. My time goes into shipping new features, fixing the bugs that surface, and the less glamorous-but-critical work of keeping a mature Rails codebase healthy: framework upgrades, dependency hygiene and performance tuning. Roughly 25 developers, SCRUM, plenty of room to grow.

Ruby on Rails JavaScript PostgreSQL SCRUM
PL.

Playlists / Airplays Live

What started as a small experiment to see which song airs most on Dutch radio has grown into Airplays — a Rails 8.1 API that monitors stations like NPO, QMusic, SLAM!, KINK and Talpa. It identifies tracks via SongRec (Shazam) and AcoustID fingerprinting, captures ad-free audio with persistent FFmpeg streams, then enriches each song with metadata from Spotify, YouTube, Last.fm, Deezer, iTunes, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia. Sidekiq handles the background work; a daily chart surfaces the week's most-played tracks.

Rails 8.1 Sidekiq PostgreSQL Redis FFmpeg Spotify API
Live ↗ Source
OCR_

OCR service Live

A small Sinatra app that turns uploaded images into plain text using Tesseract under the hood. Drop in a screenshot or photo, get the recognised text back. Containerised with Docker so it runs the same on my laptop as it does in production.

Ruby Sinatra Tesseract Docker
Live ↗ Source
RSVP♥

Wedding RSVP Shipped

A Rails app I built for our own wedding. Per-guest invite codes with QR links, printable PDF invitations via wicked_pdf, and an RSVP form that lets guests reply with a photo or message. Devise for auth, Sidekiq for the background mailers, Postgres and Redis underneath. Archived now — it served its purpose.

Ruby on Rails Devise Sidekiq PostgreSQL QR codes
Live ↗ Source
IP?

IP lookup Side project

A small Sinatra service for stretching plain Ruby outside of Rails. Looks up your public IP against MaxMind's GeoLite2 databases and returns country, city, coordinates and ISP. Same endpoint serves browsers (HTML with a map) or curl (JSON) — picked via content negotiation.

Ruby Sinatra MaxMind GeoLite2
Live ↗ Source