Pieter Dirk Soels

My name is Pieter Dirk Soels, computer science student at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and Java developer at Xillio for two days a week. I am currently in my third year and had a strong desire to gain practical experience beside my studies. A fellow student pointed out Xillio, because he also works there part-time. I started working at this company in November 2015.

The nice thing about my work as a Java Developer at Xillio is that I can apply the theory I learn during my studies. But also the other way around; The experience I gain helps me to better understand the theory.

Even large projects
At Xillio you have a lot of freedom in the projects you do. I work on a lot of different small and large projects. For example, one of these projects has been to speed up current techniques for text extraction from PDF's. Furthermore, I have integrated a template engine with our scripting language Xill.

Flexibility in projects and working hours
For me as a student, it is very important to have a flexible employer. And Xillio certainly is. I get a lot of freedom in projects, working hours and I can even work from home. But the most important thing is that I gain a lot of working experience. Maybe I'll even learn more here than during my studies.