About

I'm Eelco Hillenius. My parents gifted me a Commodore 64 for my 12th birthday, and within days I cared less about playing games than about making them. I taught myself to write them, and ran straight into everything that comes after the first idea: you need tools of your own to build at any real scale, you hit optimization problems that force you to understand what the machine is actually doing, you end up rigging an art pipeline so the whole thing doesn't collapse under its own weight. That was the hook. And all these years later, it still is.

I studied Business Informatics, which combined computer science — programming, databases and SQL, computer architecture, and networking — with subjects like supply chain management and change management. Those courses got me interested in workflows while I was still studying: how work moves through an organization and how to improve it. I've continued to supplement that foundation with computer science certificates and self-study.

My first big experience with open source was Apache Wicket, a component-based Java web framework. Its original creator had shipped a first version and was moving on, just as we'd chosen Wicket at Topicus over the usual options of the time, like Struts, and committed to getting it to production quality. We pulled together a team from Topicus and the project's early community contributors, and added the features Wicket needed to be successful for our company as well as for the larger community. We eventually brought it into the Apache Software Foundation, which was its own kind of education, and I co-wrote Wicket in Action along the way.

At Renaissance, I work as a Director of Software Engineering. It's an e-learning company with a fantastic mission: To accelerate learning for all children and adults of all ability levels and ethnic and social backgrounds, worldwide. I lead several teams that provide tools and shared services for our content teams. I also lead PIE, an open-source framework for delivering and authoring online assessments. It's Renaissance's preferred technology for editing and serving assessment items.

A couple of years into my second Director role, I'm still very hands-on. I've always believed engineering leadership needs to stay technical, and I've been fortunate to work for companies that value that.

Chillenious LLC gives me an outlet to explore other software projects related to some of my hobbies, like playing music and video games. I run it in my spare time and also do occasional consultancy, such as advising companies on how to adopt AI in their engineering processes.

Home is Sammamish, Washington. The fastest way to reach me is email: [email protected]. You can also find me on LinkedIn.