Authors - Rob van den Berg - Essent IT

My work is important to me. It’s not just something I do for eight hours a day; it’s something that needs to align with my personality. It should give me the opportunity to apply my analytical thinking and logical reasoning to problems. I need the chance to learn new things and share that knowledge. As long as my work offers me that, I show up every day with enthusiasm.

View on autonomous teams: part one

Spotlight on Essenters: Aditi Paliwal

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today, we will chat with Aditi Paliwal, a Software Engineering Manager/Release Train Engineer at Essent....

Opening the Book on Neurodiversity: Insights from Community Members

Opening the Book on Neurodiversity: Insights from Community Members By Rob van den Berg and Steve de Vette....

Podcast: Front Row at the Backend Episode 3

Spotlight on Essenters: Karin Derks

Hi, I'm Karin Derks. I live in Eindhoven with my husband and son. In my free time, I enjoy being outdoors, playing padel, skiing, and spending...

Podcast: Front Row at the Backend Episode 2

From ML experiment to model serving API within 1 hour.

At Essent, we empower data scientists to be fully in control of the end-to-end lifecycle of data science models. Most of this lifecycle is covered...

Podcast: Front Row at the Backend Episode 1

At Essent, agile means empowering engineers, learning fast, and continuously improving to deliver impactful results. Learn more about the wat of...

Spotlight On Essenters: Iryna Teliukh

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Iryna Teliukh, a Community Manager at Essent.

Spotlight on Essenters: Jacqueline van Arkel

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Jacqueline van Arkel, a Conversational AI Engineer at Essent.

Building a monorepo platform team to ensure fast flow

BUILDING A MONOREPO PLATFORM TEAM TO ENSURE FAST FLOW

Spotlight on Essenters: Marloes van den Bragt - van de Wouw

Hi, I'm Marloes van den Bragt-van de Wouw and I am a software engineer at Essent. In my free time, I like to be outdoors, enjoy bouldering and I...

An Essent Case Study: Rebuilding the Essent app

An Essent Case Study: How rebuilding our apps prepared us for the future and increased the app store rating by 1.5 points

Spotlight on Essenters: Rob van Nistelrooij

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Rob van Nistelrooij, a UX Designer at Essent....

Secure deployment to the cloud using OpenID Connect

Making a Difference: Essents role in the Refugee Talent Hub

At Essent our commitment to inclusivity goes beyond our internal culture—it extends into the wider community through initiatives like the Refugee...

Spotlight On Essenters: Prince Kumar

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Prince Kumar, a DevOps Engineer at Essent....

Spotlight on Essenters: Bipul Singh

Hi, I'm Bipul Singh and I am a Solution Architect at Essent. I’m originally from India and in my free time I enjoy cooking, playing the keyboard...

The DevOps Dilemma and HyperHub

The DevOps Dilemma and HyperHub Conquering Complexity for Happy Developers....

Hackaton 2024

At Essent we are thrilled to share the success of our recent hackathon event, Watt-a-Hack. This annual event has become a highlight for our company,...

Spotlight on Essenters: Melih Korkmaz

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Melih Korkmaz, a Senior Frontend Engineer at Essent.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at Essent

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation that is based on software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI)...

Spotlight On Essenters: Ismail Osman

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Ismail Osman, a IT Program Manager (trainee) at Essent....

Centralizing our consents with a new consent management platform

Spotlight on Essenters: Ali Habib

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Ali Habib, a Senior Cloud Architect at Essent.

Combining on-premise ERP systems with the modern cloud world

In large organisations such as Essent, monolithic systems such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) play a critical role. Combining these systems...

Spotlight on Essenters: Aaron Jacobs

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Aaron Jabocs, Cloud DevOps Engineer at Essent.

Cloud Reference Architecture 2.0

In September 2022, due to the war in Ukraine and the announcement of a significant rise in energy prices, Essent's customers took a greater...

Spotlight on Essenters: Karol Muciek

Welcome to a new Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Karol Muciek, a Senior Cloud Architect at Essent.

Traceability across Essent's Tech Landscape

As a software application or system expands, it becomes increasingly important to have a method for tracing and creating a timeline of how the...

Spotlight on Essenters: Toon Wijnands

Hi, I'm Toon and I am a Lead Enterprise Architect at Essent. In my free time I like to play the piano and used to play volleyball for a long...

Essent's Tech Evolution: Monorepo Adoption and API Innovation

Spotlight on Essenters - Paul Hoogstede

Welcome to this Spotlight on Essenters! Today we will have a chat with Paul Hoogstede, Release Train Engineer at Essent IT....

The Kafka serverless journey - Annotations on Lambda functions to automate Kafka connector setup

CIO of the Year award

Our CIO, Michiel Valk, has been nominated for the CIO of the Year Award!

Spotlight on Essenters - Revathy Umapathy

Revathy joined Essent in November 2021, where she is a DevOps Engineer.
In this spotlight, we get to know her a bit better!

Securing the Software Development Lifecycle with OWASP SAMM

To help Essent measure the maturity of current security practices, and identify less mature ones, we used the Open Web Application Security Project’s...

Paddle boarding (SUP) event!

Essent IT went SUPing in the canals of Den Bosch!

Spotlight on Essenters: Evelien van Blitterswijk

Evelien joined Essent in 2018. Starting as an individual contributor in the data domain, she has developed to the position of Manager of Platform and...

Is pseudonymization the answer to your GDPR problems?

Learn how Essent dealt with GDPR compliancy across its IT systems.

Spotlight on Essenters: Ilse van Baardwijk

Ilse coaches one of Essent's IT departments and their leadership on their collaboration, communications, behavior, quality, and way of working. In...

Essenters on stage at Data In Motion conference

Essent's heroes Sami Alashabi and Flavius Fernandes showcased "The Transformative Journey of Kafka at Essent" at the Data In Motion...

Spotlight on Essenters: Tom Voigt - Jansen

In this edition of "Spotlight on Essenters", we had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Voigt-Jansen, a DevOps Engineer Frontend at Essent IT....

Techlab – Project Xperiment: EIS & Hydrogen by ChatGPT?!

Welcome back to yet another blog post from the Techlab. A little while ago we posted our previous blog about Project Xperiment Part 1! We are proud...

Cloud security aggregation within Essent

As we continue to grow and shift increasingly toward cloud-managed services, the number of our accounts and assets also increases. To maintain insight...

Hackathon 2023 - One-stop energy shop

In June of this year, we organized the first Essent-wide Hackathon, which was led by a diverse team of nine members to ensure a broad participant...

Unleashing the Power of Collaboration and Learning – Essent IT's Knowledge Market

In June 2022, Essent IT introduced a new initiative called the Knowledge Market. The Knowledge Market is a platform where members from our IT...

Essent @TEQnation 2023

Essent Attended the TEQnation in June. We asked Aditi, one of our colleagues how she experienced the event. Read more about Aditi her story.

DevOpsCon London 2023

In late April, the Essent CRAFTs Heroes team had the privilege of attending the highly anticipated DevOpsCon in London. This renowned conference...

Navigating the price cap at Essent: What this means for consumers

In late 2021, households across the Netherlands were hit by skyrocketing energy prices, resulting from inflation in various markets, including the...

Techlab – Project Xperiment – Hidden pearls in AWS

Techlab, a team focused on innovation within Essent IT, recently hosted their first-ever Project Xperiment event, where they collaborated with...

Exploring the Power of Textual Data Analysis

The article introduces Ruud Goorden, a data scientist at Essent who applies his expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze customer...

CRAFTs Heroes - How can I continue growing?

Over the past year, the energy market has undergone significant changes, providing Essent with a challenging yet rewarding period of growth and...

Digital Platform in a turbulent energy market

Over the past year, the energy market has undergone significant changes, providing Essent with a challenging yet rewarding period of growth and...

Self-selection workshop

Last December, RTE Paul Hoogstede and Agile coach Annelies van Dijk held a self-selection workshop for DevOps engineers. The idea behind this workshop...

Essent @ Tweakers Privacy & Security Event

Essent is committed to upholding the highest standards of privacy and security in the development and support of its systems. On Saturday November...

LACE represent @DSD22

Our Lean Agile Center of Excellence was represented at the Digital Specialist Day of 2022. On November 23rd and 24th, a total of around 300 Agilists...

Techlab proudly presents: the new and improved Techradar!

At Techlab, we developed a tool called Techradar to aid us in tracking and communicating the progress of the various technologies and use cases that...

Essent's Modernization Journey

I am Anthony Roes a Product Owner within Essent and in this blogpost I would like to tell you a bit about the modernization journey that we are...

Essent and Web data processing using Kafka

Essent is well-known for its impressive stature in the Dutch market. With a history dating back to 1999, the company has always been exploring new...

Introducing Databricks at Essent

The start of new things can bring new perspectives, and new perspectives can bring great things and new ideas which we of course always value at...

How to drive change

Change is inevitable. It is not constant, it is exponential. Everything is turning into either a software or hardware problem. Classical organizations...

Speed, Lies and Bottlenecks

Since the age of the internet, the speed at which things are being created and changed has been unparalleled. Bertrand Russell, one of the last...

Being a scrum master at Essent

This past August, we held an offsite event for the scrum master community of Essent IT. This offsite event was held so that there could be an in-depth...

Hacking like crazy!

It all started with an e-mail, an idea, a simple “what if?” during our day start. Little did we know we would end up in Munich, having the most...

The hackathon result: Essent’s skill matrix chatbot

In this article we would like to dive into the details and results of our hackathon project. Our goal was to build a smart skill matrix which will...

Storytelling within the art of Enterprise Architecture

This story is about how we as an architecture community must focus on the narrative we are trying to tell. A story is what brings the core of what we...

We all have a role to play

There is not a single human being who could make a modern pencil from scratch!

Our view on becoming a Tech Company

At Essent, our view on energy is that Sustainability and the energy transition are about people‘s behavior. We want to help everyone take their next...

We are Techlab!

We are Techlab, the one and only innovation hub of Essent IT. Keep reading to find out more about Techlab, its members and the way we work!