Meet Tim Vereecke: Technical Solutions Architect
Using a developer-first mindset to solve web performance challenges
When Tim Vereecke started out, he had a passion for web development, and now he uses his developer-first mindset to find and share creative internet performance solutions with a larger audience.
The Developer Champions program at Akamai has been a valuable forum for Tim’s vast knowledge, where he runs workshops, updates technical documents, and interacts with members of the Akamai community.
I sat down with Tim to learn how his career path led to Akamai and to discuss what day-to-day resources he recommends for developers.
From hobby page builds to large-scale government websites
Tim’s first developer project was no small task. He was asked to build Belgium’s first government website. Looking back, Tim still remembers the thrill of marveling at the scale and significance of the project, watching millions of people look up election results.
Tim took on content management system projects for Documentum and EMC, while building several successful hobby websites in his spare time. One of those websites became the largest scale-modeling website in the world with 40,000 visitors a day.
Developers are lifelong students. Running the site is a lesson in offloads, scalability, and the importance of uptime. “As soon as the website is down, Facebook is getting hammered with questions from my audience,” Tim explains. In preparation for moments like these, he studies by reading old-fashioned books like Advanced MySQL Performance Tuning or Building Scalable Web Sites.
Akamai’s strength is its ubiquity and flexibility
“I always wanted to work with large customers — the pioneers of the internet who are doing state-of-the-art innovation,” Tim explains. “Since day one, I was always interested in web performance and the cloud, but I wanted to work more on the delivery side, solving performance issues from high-volume Black Friday traffic to DDoS attacks. Being able to work for Akamai was actually a great fit.”
It’s been eight years since Tim reached out to Akamai — and the rest is history.
Making the internet work
In the most basic terms, Tim explains to his daughters (aged 6 and 8) that he works for a company that “makes the internet work.” He explains, “It needs to be fast. It needs to be scalable. It needs to be secure. Whenever you use your iPad, go to a website, shop online, or download something — that’s when our customers use Akamai.” He admits that his daughters frequently come across slow websites that “need Daddy’s help.”
A lot has changed in the eight years Tim has been at Akamai. “Technology evolved to where you now have HB2, QUIC, TLS version 1.3, IPv6, HTTP/2, Brotli compression,” he explains. So many elements have been added in the last few years, it can be challenging to keep up. Akamai allows developers to get the benefits of new techniques, without having to think about it. “It’s just a tick in the box — done! — and they can focus on solving the business problems they need to solve,” Tim explains.
What Tim loves about being a Developer Champion
Tim is a standout member of the Developer Champions Program. He loves applying his developer mindset to figure out the answers to “big picture” problems for other developers — whether they’re new to Akamai or looking to get that “last 10 percent” of fuel for their success.
Inside a developer’s data source repository
Tim’s main starting point for anything is always developer.akamai.com. With so many APIs, almost everything can be automated. “There you have the full technical docs,” he explains, “but you also have many interesting blog posts from my colleagues, where they share their professional services, share what they did for other customers, or even where customers share what they’ve done.”
Often, what developers need is a single source of truth based on a few examples and a way of getting started quickly. The publicly available online repository offers just that. Sometimes getting started can be overwhelming — which is why Tim created a small deck called “How to Get Started with Akamai DevOps.” He recommends starting small with a purge and custom dashboard creation to extract useful information from the portal. All these valuable baby steps can then lead to next-level work.
When developers need a bit more detail, the EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV products meet their needs. The team runs weekly “getting started” sessions to point new EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV users in the right direction. Tim personally checks developer.akamai.com every Monday morning to see what’s going on and find use cases the team can solve.
Using EdgeWorkers and the key-value store
“There is a drive from everybody to make the default better, faster, and easier to use,” Tim explains. He uses his blog space to share how he uses EdgeWorkers and the key-value store to accelerate autocomplete or provide technical deep dives on purging by cache techs.
“The default documentation explains what it is and how it works,” says Tim, “but the Developer Champions angle is: How do you use it in practice? How can you use it to solve problems for e-commerce or media companies?”
Make it easier for developers
Workshops also do a great job of problem-solving web performance issues, but they can be very tailored. Tim extracts the reusable findings from these workshops and shares them with the world, making it easier for developers to work with Akamai.
Crowdsourcing knowledge in an open forum
Tim uses an EdgeWorkers space on Slack to connect with customers who have questions or are looking for support from the developers in the community. The open forum encourages the sharing of solutions for security, productivity, and performance issues that make our lives collectively easier and better, he says.
Tim recommends searching for Akamai on the popular code repository, GitHub. Developers who are preparing to deploy a new version of their code can automatically send an annotation to Akamai mPulse RUM or deploy files automatically to NetStorage through ready-to-use GitHub actions.
Tim explains, “As soon as you commit to a branch, then you can decide to automatically call the Akamai CLI for EdgeWorkers and do a deploy and a push to staging or push to production.” These actions are not only built by Akamai, but also by partners or customers who have found these shortcuts helpful.
Postman is another integration Tim uses often to send curl requests. “Now we have a very easy-to-consumer Postman integration for the Akamai REST APIs,” he explains.
Terraform can be used as an out-of-the-box “infrastructure as code” provider that integrates fully with Akamai.
In addition to engaging the web performance community on Twitter, Tim has also built an open-source tool called frustrationindex.com that generates a webpage performance test score from the end-user’s perspective.
Shared successes are the fuel for future growth
Tim loves receiving custom graphs built using the API a few weeks after one of his workshops. The performance or offload improvements on the chart make it obvious that Tim’s suggestions have paid off. “That makes me really, really happy,” he says.
The Akamai team has incorporated plenty of feedback over the years and is continuously innovating. “I’d share tips on how to create a custom dimension to get certain benefits in some of the earlier workshops. Initially, customers needed my advice to get more out of the product — which was easy to do — but now they don’t even need to do that because the product got better.”
For a passionate developer like Tim, that’s exciting — and precisely why he loves working with Akamai and the Developer Advocacy team.
Learn more
Interested in watching highlights from the interview? Find this episode of The Developer’s Edge on our YouTube channel.
