Hey there!
I'm Nick, a Dutch full-stack engineer living in Helsinki with my Finnish wife Sonja. We're here for the nature and the people, and we love going on adventures together.
I took the scenic route into software. I studied sport science, booked bands for music venues, and spent years as a wilderness guide and instructor in Lapland. Then I learned to code at Hive Helsinki.
At Soil Scout I went from Full Stack Engineer to Lead Full Stack Engineer, leading development of The Hub, the dashboard for our buried soil sensors. In June the company moved on to a different product and my role ended, so now I'm building something of my own: Tiny Tarrasque, an app for people who play tabletop role-playing games together.
Health still runs my day: gym, good food, meditation, and lately skateboarding again. Now I'm looking for my next team, ideally as a CTO or founding engineer. If you're building something with great people, let's talk. ✨
Why does the rest of this page look like a game? It's styled like a character sheet from tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Players use one to keep track of who their hero is and what they're good at. This one is mine, with real numbers and no dice rolling involved.
Nick van den Dungen
Character name- Class · what I do
- Full-stack engineer
- Background · what I did before
- Wilderness guide
- Home base
- Helsinki, or remote
- Languages
- Dutch, English, Finnish (A2)
- Alignment · moral compass
- Neutral good
- Does the right thing, pragmatically, without needing a rulebook.
- Status
- Open to new roles
- CTO, founding engineer or full-stack. Available right away, no visa needed.
Ability scores
in the game you roll these with dice; mine are real numbers
- Strength6.5M+sensor uploads an hour, kept running
- DexterityFullstack: web, mobile, backend, infra
- ConstitutionBScsport science, and still training
- Intelligence85test files guarding one solo app
- Wisdom200+code reviews given at Hive
- Charisma10+years teaching and guiding groups
Features & traits · how I work
- Ownership. Six months into Soil Scout I owned the whole software product, working with sales and support to find the pain points.
- Strategy. You set a goal, I take care of how we get there.
- Communication. I wrote a company newsletter that explained the software side to everyone, technical or not.
- Leadership. Built Soil Scout's hiring pipeline from scratch, hired a junior developer and mentored him for six months.
- Transparency. You'll always know what's going on, in the code and with me.
- Urgency. When a company is in a critical phase, I move fast.
- Keeps his own stats up. Gym, healthy food, meditation, skateboarding.
Proficiencies · skills
Product
Backend & data
Infrastructure & quality
Working with AI
Foundations
Inventory · off the clock
- Reading: Dungeon Crawler Carl
- On repeat: Sunborn
- A skateboard, a gym bag, too many dice
Remo
Senior fur stack engineer. Reviews every walk, approves every snack.
Illustration by Laura Arroz
Experience · the campaign log
Where I've learned by doing.
Jun 2026 – now · Tiny Tarrasque
Founder & Engineer
Building an offline-first tabletop RPG companion app solo: product discovery, architecture, AI-assisted delivery, testing with real players and the path to a paid tier.
Oct 2024 – Jun 2026 · Soil Scout
Full Stack → Lead Full Stack Engineer
Joined as a Full Stack Engineer and was promoted to lead in October 2025. Led development of The Hub, Soil Scout's sensor dashboard (Django + React). Looked after the PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB infrastructure on GCP behind 6.5M+ sensor uploads an hour, kept deployments automated with GitHub Actions and Ansible, and built the hiring pipeline from scratch.
2022 – 2024 · Hive Helsinki
Software Engineering Student & Peer Mentor
Peer-to-peer curriculum in C/C++, Unix internals, algorithms and memory management. Evaluated 200+ peer code submissions; our team capstone was a real-time multiplayer 3D Pong, where I led the front end. Also on the student board (Hexagon ry) as head of internal relations, organising community events.
2023 – 2024 · University of Helsinki
Full Stack Open
React, Node.js, Express, TypeScript, automated testing (Jest, Cypress) and containerised CI/CD.
2013 – 2024 · Netherlands, Sweden & Finland
Coach, guide & teacher
Bootcamp instructor who trained other instructors (during my degree), snowboard instructor, activity instructor and wilderness guide in Finnish and Swedish Lapland, after-school instructor, and a part-time Dutch teacher for young kids. Years of keeping groups safe, engaged and learning.
2012 – 2016 · HAN University of Applied Sciences
Bachelor of Sport Science
Sport and leisure management: team dynamics, project coordination and leading groups.
Looking for someone to join your team?
Tell me what you're building. Grab a tea, roll some dice, build something good.