Tim Alaerts

Upon joining a client facing an urgent and critical back-end staffing deficit, I quickly identified that frequent regressions were undermining development stability. To mitigate this risk, I created and deployed an end-to-end testing suite based on historical regression findings. The suite now serves as a safety net, restoring team confidence and dramatically improving the velocity and quality of new feature implementation.

In addition to stabilizing the testing process, my primary role involves core back-end development using NestJS. I focus on the practical implementation of server-side logic, including structuring databases, writing API endpoints (using REST), and handling business rules within the NestJS framework. I am solely responsible for building and maintaining these crucial back-end components.

I identified that while the codebase utilizes some Domain-Driven Design concepts, it lacks one of the most fundamental elements: rich domain models (instead relying on anemic models). I am currently driving the initiative to refactor these models to correctly house business logic. This transition requires some team education, so I guide other developers on applying these patterns effectively while working on new features, ensuring we fully realize the benefits of DDD.

As part of the GLiTR team at Mediahuis, I play a key role in developing and maintaining a scalable backend system using NestJS, which underpins the company’s data tracking infrastructure across all its websites. This system ensures the efficient collection and processing of user interaction data, which is crucial for meeting the organization’s extensive tracking and analytics requirements.

I am also responsible for building and improving a front-end SDK that integrates with Google Analytics. This SDK simplifies the implementation of tracking solutions for developers, making it easier to ensure accurate and reliable data collection. The data processed by our systems powers Mediahuis’s AI models, enabling predictions of user behavior and evaluations of article quality, thereby supporting data-driven decisions across editorial and product teams.

One of my notable achievements has been reducing Azure cloud costs by automating the cleanup of outdated container app versions. I developed a cron job within the Azure pipeline that identifies and removes old containers, significantly optimizing resource management and lowering operational expenses.

I am integrating the Flagsmith library into our system by creating a custom NestJS module. This module allows the API to leverage feature flagging capabilities, enabling dynamic configuration and more efficient feature deployment across Mediahuis’s platforms. This implementation enhances flexibility and scalability, contributing to the robustness of our backend infrastructure.

Through these efforts, I collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-performance, scalable, and compliant solutions, ensuring Mediahuis’s data infrastructure remains reliable while empowering teams with actionable insights and innovative tools.

This project started within a team that is responsible for the domain of home nursing, but was moved soon after to the invoicing domain to help the finance team fix bugs to enable them to do a refactor.

In the beginning I worked on adding rigid validation to the api for a dynamic forms feature that our team created and is used by other teams within the company to avoid data inconsistency while setting up new forms. Besides that I extended the capabilities of our parsers to interpret Sumehr data.

After our team moved to the invoicing domain, where I either expanded existing rules or added new rules operating on invoiceable attendances of a healthcare worker, I reverse engineered the xml data sent from the government. This allows us to automatically update the daily ceiling each time the ‘riziv’ sends out new prices.