me

My Name is Oliver van Porten. I was born on May 20, 1982 in Cologne, Germany. You can find a selection of current and older projects in my portfolio. A detailed CV is available on Xing and LinkedIn.

A Personal Note

I like to read, mainly Science Fiction, Cyberpunk and Fantasy. I am a big Terry Pratchett fan, and loved The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I genuinly enjoyed the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling. I am very much desperate to read the final volume of Game of Thrones and still refuse to watch the TV series.

More recently I have been into what classifies as young adult literature: Skullduggery Pleasant by Darek Landy, Lookwood & Co. as well as Bartimaeus by Jonathan Strout and The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. I also enjoyed the LitRPG series Awaken Online by Travis Bagwell.

Reading aside, I passionately play Badminton at the TV Roetgen. A couple of year ago I started learning to play the guitar. I think I am (ever so slowly) improving my skills - mainly thatnks to my guitar teacher Klaus. I started playing a Dreadnought Western Acoutistic Guitar but have in the meanwhile almost exclusively moved to playing an electric Epiphone Les Paul Tribute Plus.

Professional Experience

  • Cerence GmbH , Aachen,Germany

    • Senior Principal Software Engineer - TTS Research & Development, since February 2021

      Working on novel text-to-speech products in the cloud using Python, Docker, Kubernetes and a variety of other tools and frameworks.

  • Trimplement GmbH, Cologne, Germany

    • Senior Software Engineer, November 2020 - January 2021

      Development of E-Wallet solutions using Java, Spring and SpringBoot.

  • Cerence GmbH / Nuance Communications Deutschland GmbH , Aachen,Germany

    • (Senior) Manager Software Engineering TTS - TTS Research & Development, May 2014 - October 2020

      During my time at Cerence//Nuance I worked in various management roles and led different teams.

      In my management career, among other things, I was responsible for the development of voice input (ASR, Automatic Speech Recognition) and voice output (TTS, text-to-speech) systems. In addition, I was responsible for the complete release infrastructure as well as the associated processes for the text-to-speech organization.

      I cultivated and still maintain an agile and cooperative management style and see myself more as a coach than as a boss.

      Whenever my time allowed it I - also as a manager - actively helped with development, especially in the area of DevOps and automation, but also with development of web-based tools and demos, using tools and languages such as Jenkins, Artifactory, BitBucket, Python and Groovy and framework such as Angular and Bootstrap. I do believe it is important to eat your own dog food and really understand your product (and the pains that come with developing it).

    • Senior Software Engineer - Embedded Research & Development, May 2012 - January 2014

      As a Senior Sofware Engineer I took a leading role in the architecture and development of a framework for embedded language systems using C++. As a Scrum Master I established Scrum as a process and then dealt a lot with building and developing the team.

  • University of Applied Sciences, Aachen, Germany

    • Assistant Lecturer,  March 2015 - July 2017

      As an assitant lecturer I ran Information Systems I in the * Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD)* degree course. I was responsible for conducting lectures and exercises as well as exams. The main focus was the development of websites with HTML5, CSS3, PHP and MySQL.

  • Generali Deutschland Informatik Services GmbH, Aachen, Germany

    • System Designer, January 2012 - April 2012

      A short guest appearance as a system designer and application developer in the KFZ project. Maintenance and further development of the service offering as part of the company-wide Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.

  • Nuance Communications Aachen GmbH, Aachen, Germany

    • Software Engineer, September 2007 - December 2011

      Worked as a software engineer in the Professional Services team. The main focus was the porting of the speech input and output engines to different embedded platforms. Furthermore, I took a leading role in the architecture and implementation of a software stack for executing remote procedure calls on a multi-processor (big-little, ARM+DSP) platform, using C.

    • Student Employee, Intern, Graduand, December 2005 - August 2007

      As a graduand, I work on the introduction and development of a process and the associated tools for the automatic tuning of the parameters of the speech recognition engine. The tools were created in Python. The process was based on best practices from projects. As an intern in the Professional Services Team I was mainly developing software with C. As a student employee I was working mostly on the preparation of language corpora for customer data collections as well as the development of tools to simplify the process.

  • University of Applied Sciences, Aachen, Germany

    • Student Assistant with Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Faßbender, September 2005 - June 2006

      Student assistant for the courses object-oriented software development and compiler construction. Did several presentations on software test techniques like JUnit, FIT / FitNesse and JWebUnit. Support of fellow students in the implementation of the lecture-accompanying internships.

  • Developia.de, Berlin, Germany

    • Head of Development (Freelance), Juni 2004 - December 2006

      Development of the PHP-based content management system for developia.de. At the time, Developia.de was the largest German-speaking community for hobby and semi-professional developers. Development of a web service with SOAP.

  • EMI Music Germany GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany

    • Intern IT, June 2002 - August 2002

      Development of software, support of the workstation computers in the Mediapark and support of the data center at the Butzweilerhof.

Publications

  • van Porten, O.: Development and Evaluation of a Graphical Notation for Modelling Resource-Oriented Applications. Research Report 1/2012, FernUniversität in Hagen (March 2012), http://deposit.fernuni-hagen.de/2810/
  • van Porten, O., Schreier, S., 2012, ‘Visual REST: A Graphical Modeling Language for Resource-Oriented Applications’, Pre-proceedings of the Poster Track of the 5th International Conference on Software Language Engineering, ed A. Bagge, D. Kolovos, pp. 14-19.

Education

  • FernUniversität in Hagen, Hagen, Germany

    Computer Science, Master of Science, August 2008 - March 2012 (part-time)

    Specialization: Software Engineering and Programming Languages

  • University of Applied Sciences Aachen, Aachen,Germany

    Computer Science, Diplom Informatiker (FH), August 2002 - August 2007

  • Gymnasium Bonnstrasse, Hürth, Germany

    Abitur 2001