Fons Van Der Plas
Educational Development Officer
Wageningen, Gelderland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFons Van Der Plas is an educational development officer and software engineer with 11 years of experience blending teaching, tooling and open-source development. He helped design interactive learning environments like Pluto.jl at MIT and contributes to core Julia projects—improving modules such as Markdown, Base64, Dates and the REPL—bringing production-quality fixes, tests and documentation. His background in mathematics and hands-on teaching (Radboud University) informs a user-focused approach to developer tooling and autograding for computational courses. At JuliaWeb he strengthened HTTP and WebSocket reliability through targeted bug fixes and expanded test coverage, demonstrating care for interoperability and robustness. Now based in Wageningen and recently transitioning into educational development at Eindhoven University of Technology, he combines classroom experience with low-level backend contributions. An unexpected thread through his profile is ongoing curiosity beyond software—he has pursued vocational tree-worker training, reflecting practical problem-solving outside the codebase.
12 years of coding experience
Training European Tree Worker, Training European Tree Worker at Inverde Natuuropleidingen LeuvenMaster of Science - MS, Computer Simulations for Science and Engineering (dropped out), Master of Science - MS, Computer Simulations for Science and Engineering (dropped out) at Technische Universität BerlinBachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics at Radboud University NijmegenBachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics at Université Paris Diderot
Stackoverflow
1,727reputation
334kreached
24answers
1question
base64
top-5%
Github Skills (24)
markdown10
url-encoding10
computation10
urn10
testing10
http10
websocket10
markdown-it10
uri10
julia10
algorithms9
base649
repr9
dates9
error-handling9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
mitmath/computational-thinking
Aug 2020 - Dec 2022
Course 18.S191 at MIT, Fall 2022 - Introduction to computational thinking with Julia
Role in this project:
Student (Learning & Implementation)
Student (Learning & Implementation)Contributions:7 reviews, 525 commits, 96 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Fons's contributions focus on completing homework assignments within a course on computational thinking with Julia. They added and modified code for homework assignments, primarily in the form of Pluto notebooks. This includes implementing algorithms for square root calculation and working with images, specifically with color manipulation.
juliajulia-languagecomputational-thinkingmitpluto-notebooks
JuliaWeb/HTTP.jl
Mar 2020 - Nov 2022
HTTP for Julia
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 19 commits, 20 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Fons made several contributions focused on improving the HTTP.jl library. They addressed WebSocket error handling, deprecated function usage, and stream closing behavior. Additionally, the user added and updated tests for URI functionality, server behavior, and WebSocket integration with a Deno client, ensuring the library's reliability and compatibility. They also improved error logging and fixed issues related to proxy and cookie handling.
julia
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