About
Tjakoen Stolk
Senior Technical Team Lead at Career Team and part-time computer science instructor at Holy Angel University.
I direct, Claude types.
Profile
How I try to do the work
- As a teacher, I treat students like adults, go straight at the hard parts, and automate the mechanical work so I can spend more time teaching.
- As an engineer, I hold the architecture and quality bar, and keep the direction legible to whoever opens the file next.
- As a manager, I grow people first. The goals arrive through them.
Filipino–Dutch software engineering leader. I manage 15 to 25 engineers and product specialists at Career Team, teach college-level software engineering to 150 to 300 students a term at Holy Angel University, and have completed one year in the classroom. Most of my nine years have gone into growing engineers, shipping cloud-native products from zero, and finding ways to make both jobs fit in one week.
The teaching platform supports several live university courses and hundreds of student repositories each term. See the platform, its architecture, and its privacy-safe demo →
As a teacher
I teach the way I wish I had been taught: straight at the hard parts, adults treated as adults, the mechanical work automated so the time goes back to the students.
- Treat adults like adults and most of the fluff falls away. My students get the real thing, limits included.
- Automate the mechanical grading so the time goes back to students. I built a GitHub-native platform to buy back the hours I was drowning in.
- Go straight at the hard parts. Nobody signs up for a semester to be kept away from the difficult idea.
- You end up teaching the way you wish you had been taught. I nearly quit before I found a way to make it sustainable.
Inspect the GitHub-native classroom I built →
Read: I Nearly Quit Teaching. So I Automated the Part That Was Killing Me. Log: Back at LOOP, starting with Git
As an engineer
I own the architecture, hold the quality bar, and keep the direction legible to whoever opens the file next. Fewer decisions, made in the open, held in review.
- Fewer moving parts beats a clever abstraction almost every time. I have deleted more code than I was ever proud of writing.
- The design that survives is the one the next person can read. I write for the stranger who opens the file at two in the morning.
- Standards live in review, not in a document nobody reopens. I would rather hold the bar in a pull request than in a wiki.
- A build step you can delete is a decision you get to keep making. This whole site runs with no build, on purpose.
See the architecture I built and how its layers fit →
Read: I Built a Whole Stack Because No To-Do App Would Have Me
As a manager
I mentor and support the people first, then deliver the goals through them. The team is the thing I am really building; the features are what falls out of it.
- Mentoring is the job, not the overhead. A junior I actually grow is worth more than any single feature I could have written myself.
- Direction is something you repeat, not something you announce once. I say the same why in standup, in review, and in the doc, until it is boring.
- I ship the small internal tool that unblocks five people before the feature that demos well.
- The honest version of a status is the one that ages well. I would rather write down what is blocked and why than hand up a green square that turns red next week.
CV
I am a teacher, engineer, and manager. I treat students as adults, go straight at the hard parts, and automate mechanical grading so I can spend more time teaching. I hold the architecture and quality bar, and keep direction legible to whoever opens the file next. I grow people first and deliver goals through them. I lead 15 to 25 engineers and product specialists at Career Team, teach college-level software engineering to 150 to 300 students each term, and have completed one year in the classroom. I also build the BREAD stack.
Professional experience
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Senior Technical Team Lead
United States (remote from the Philippines)
Manage and mentor 15 to 25 Software Engineers and Product Specialists, and lead the team's AI-first development culture.
- Spearheaded scalable full-stack solutions with Next.js, NestJS, and MongoDB on AWS microservices for U.S. government and education clients.
- Rolled out AI coding assistants, set review standards for AI-generated code, and integrated AI-assisted workflows into delivery.
- Turned social-impact goals into technical specifications with product, design, and leadership.
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Part-Time Instructor
Angeles City, Philippines
Teach college-level software engineering to 150 to 300 students a term across up to seven classes. One year in the classroom completed.
- Lecture and mentor 150 to 300 students each term across up to seven classes on software engineering, modern frameworks, and architecture.
- Designed full-stack web and mobile curricula with React, Vue, Node.js, Express, PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
- Built a GitHub-native course platform with signed QR attendance and human-reviewed AI grading. AI drafts; I sign. Student data stays off servers.
- Spoke on responsible AI-assisted development at the GDGoC General Assembly in August 2026.
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Chief Technology Officer
Philippines (remote); joined through Broadheader's full-team acquisition
Built a new platform from zero with the CEO and grew the founding team.
- Set the technology roadmap and built a new platform from zero, working directly with the CEO.
- Ran the product from idea to launch, hands-on to unblock engineering and ship.
- Recruited, scaled, and mentored the founding engineering and leadership team.
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IT Director and Co-Founder
Angeles, Philippines
Co-founded and built the agency's engineering arm.
- Co-founded and built the agency's engineering arm; the team was later acquired by PH Live Music.
- Designed technical strategy and system design for greenfield client applications.
- Set the initial engineering culture and standards: git-flow workflows and agile tracking.
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Operations Manager
Angeles, Philippines
Built operations from scratch and scaled to onboard a large BPO client.
- Built operations from scratch and scaled infrastructure to onboard and support a large BPO client.
- Designed business-process systems that cut operational bottlenecks.
- Directed procurement, resource allocation, and cross-functional leadership against client SLAs.
- Led go-to-market and marketing during growth phases, connecting operations to business development.
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Sales and Marketing Lead
Angeles, Philippines
Built the first sales and marketing setup and a repeatable pipeline.
- Built the company's first sales and marketing setup from scratch, with a client-acquisition system that gave the business a steady, predictable pipeline.
- Started the company's social presence and paid-ads strategy, running the first campaigns to find and convert enterprise leads.
- Standardized the sales lifecycle: the sales process, client proposals, and service contracts.
- Ran the corporate WordPress site to bring in inbound traffic and leads.
- Recruited, trained, and managed a small sales and marketing team, aligned to the company's growth targets.
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Sales and Marketing Manager, Co-owner
Zambales, Philippines
Co-ran a family resort's operations and its whole digital footprint.
- Co-managed resort operations and commercial strategy with family stakeholders, growing bookings and the guest experience across the seasons.
- Built the resort's digital footprint from scratch: the official website and a strong organic social presence.
- Ran the resort's paid-ads strategy, with campaigns that turned social engagement into steady bookings.
- Set up and integrated a central booking system across Airbnb, OTA platforms, and direct channels.
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Associate Software Engineer
Clark, Philippines
First job, recruited before graduation onto an enterprise software team.
- Recruited in my third university year, before graduation, onto a fast-paced enterprise software team.
- Learned production practice: version control, clean architecture, and agile methods.
- Worked on core software components and took part in rigorous code review.
- Balanced a full course load with the job before shifting to a family business.
Education
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Professional Science Master's (PSM) in Cybersecurity
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BS Computer Science
- President of LOOP, the official Computer Science student organization.
- Top 3rd-year student for academic and technical performance.
- Best Thesis award for research, architecture, and implementation.
Areas of expertise
- 0-to-1 product and platform engineering
- AI-first development and workflow optimization
- Driving AI adoption in engineering teams
- Full-stack microservices architecture
- Engineering mentorship and technical education
Selected projects
Technical proficiencies
Frontend and Mobile
Next.js · React · Vue · Flutter · Dart
Backend and Frameworks
NestJS · Node.js · Express · PHP · RESTful APIs
Databases and Storage
MongoDB · MySQL · PostgreSQL · Supabase · Firebase
Cloud and Infrastructure
AWS microservices
AI and Developer Tooling
Claude Code · GitHub Copilot · Apache DevLake
Tools and Methodologies
Git · Agile/Scrum · Jira · Notion
Languages
English (native) · Filipino (fluent) · Dutch (conversational)
Certifications
- Developing on AWS (EnterOne), Oct 2025
- Cloud Foundations (AWS), Jul 2026
Contact
This form and the fuller mail panel are the two ways to reach me from here, and neither is backed by a server: this is a static site, so nothing here can receive a submission. Send builds a message from what you type below and hands it to your own mail app, addressed to me, exactly the way the mail panel's compose does.
On the desk now
What's on the desk right now, dated, so it goes stale honestly instead of quietly.
- . About became a small app: profile, résumé, contact, and this list (this pass).
- . Mail: a compose panel dressed as an inbox, one real send path.
- . Calendar: a Feed of real note dates, shipped posts, and events, with a Month view over the same.
- . PROOF's plan board mounted here: server-rendered, and it wants a manual refresh. The package ships a live board too, not wired into this site yet.
- . PANTRY's whole-codebase mindmap shipped, AI-legible not AI-powered.
Recent notes
AI helps me write and review. I direct the work, test the result, and answer for what ships. How I work with AI →