Dirkjan Ochtman
Freelance Rust Expert at Stichting Rust Nederland
Utrecht, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDirkjan Ochtman is a Freelance Rust expert and seasoned engineering leader with roughly 18–20 years of experience building high-performance backends and shipping production systems as CTO of Instant Labs. He has led teams and hiring, architected core infrastructure—DNS, HTTP proxies, WHOIS, ACME and EPP servers—and rewritten critical services in Rust with a focus on robustness and performance. An active open-source maintainer, Dirkjan has contributed to major Rust projects including rustls, tokio, redis-rs and Servo, and implemented protocol-level features like QUIC TransportParameters and ED25519 support in crypto code. He combines product-minded long-term thinking with hands-on systems work, from distributed ECDSA signing to async runtime improvements, and brings experience across security, performance tooling (flamegraph) and documentation. Based in Utrecht, he also chairs Stichting Rust Nederland to grow Rust adoption locally, reflecting a rare blend of technical depth, community leadership and practical startup execution.
19 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Science, MSc Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)Gymnasium, Gymnasium at Gemeentelijk Gymnasium HilversumComputer Science Music, Computer Science Music at Wittenberg University
Dutch, English, French
Stackoverflow
11,651reputation
1.4mreached
317answers
27questions
proxy
top-5%
mercurial
top-1%
couchdb
top-5%
python
top-5%
Github Skills (125)
dependency-management10
google-cloud-platform10
cargo10
restructuredtext10
servo10
python10
package-management10
dns-resolver10
testing10
command-line-interface10
http10
databases10
c1110
url-parsing10
security10
Programming languages (31)
Github contributions (5)
console-rs/indicatif
Mar 2021 - Nov 2022
A command line progress reporting library for Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 346 reviews, 325 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Dirkjan contributed primarily to the internal structure and functionality of the progress reporting library. Their commits focused on refining the `ProgressDrawTargetKind` enum, switching to named field variants for improved code clarity and maintainability. Additionally, they fixed formatting issues and optimized the codebase by removing unnecessary code, imports, and return statements. The user also made use of code quality improvements using the clippy tool and refactored sections of the codebase to simplify or deduplicate code.
command-linerust
flamegraph-rs/flamegraph
May 2019 - Nov 2022
Easy flamegraphs for Rust projects and everything else, without Perl or pipes <3
Role in this project:Back-end & Performance Engineer
Back-end & Performance EngineerContributions:13 releases, 152 reviews, 81 commits in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dirkjan primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality and performance of the flamegraph tool. Their work included adding support for benchmark targets, improving command-line argument handling, and optimizing command construction. They also addressed potential performance issues by implementing features like escaping spaces in commands passed to dtrace and adding a verbose flag for debugging. The commits also focused on refactoring, and code clean up.
perlrustflamegraphsprofilingperf
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.