Wouter Ligtenberg

Wouter started at ING in 2017 as an IT trainee. His traineeship took him to Manila, Philippines, initially for a short-term assignment which was later extended to a year. “It wasn’t easy, but it was definitely the most educational year of my career up until now,” Wouter comments. Back in the Netherlands, he thought carefully about his next step. “Every few years, I consider what I want to do next and whether the bank still offers me enough of a challenge. So far, new and interesting projects have always come my way.”

The assignment he did in Romania is a good example of such a project, especially because it wasn’t clear-cut at the beginning. “I was asked to build a team from scratch and to start working on ‘a product’ that would help make internal application development easier, faster, more reliable and more secure.” The first major milestones were met after just six months. “The speed of our success surprised me too, to be honest,” Wouter admits. “Our product had the potential to become much bigger, and to be used by many more ING tech teams around the world.”

Talk at QCon

Wouter’s teams currently serves continuous delivery automation tools for over 500 Java applications within ING... and there are more to come. Wouter will explain all about his own and his teams’ experiences in his presentation called ‘How ING Accelerated Kubernetes Deployments Across 500+ Applications: Challenges & Lessons Learned’ at QCon London.

Start-up mindset

“In my talk, I will be addressing two main aspects of our journey: the technical part, about how to go from an idea to a solution with the tech adoption model, and the business part, about how to ‘sell’ your product and make sure it is used by your clients. These are the things you have to think about at the start of a project, which requires a kind of start-up mindset,” he adds.

Eyeopener

“I think that we – as an innovative, leading bank – should always share our experiences with the tech community. Personally, I really enjoy telling our story and sharing what we’ve learned. At the same time, I also love speaking with peers, getting feedback and discussing our craft. It would be great if my talk could be an eyeopener for a few people in the audience. I’d love them to think ‘I’ve never looked at it this way before, but let’s try’.”

QCon will take place from 27-29 March 2023 in London, UK.

Learn more at https://qconlondon.comMore about Wouter’s talk: https://qconlondon.com/speakers/wouterligtenberg