Leon Hassing
Our network is the most important thing we offer
Who is NL-ix?
Behind the world of the Internet, behind the world of fibers, protocols, peers and terabytes, are actual people making it all work. But who are these people? In other words: Who is NL-ix?
Today: 🤝 Leon Hassing, Software Developer
I ended up at NL-ix by a fairly unusual route. I studied Physics, but soon decided that lab work was not for me. I became interested in coding and software development and started to work on attachment with an IT firm. I worked at a large (pretty boring) insurance firm for 2 years, but soon I learned that I wanted to work as part of a smaller team. I was looking for other like-minded techy people and I wanted to be involved in developing more challenging solutions. Eventually I ended up as a developer at NL-ix!
I’ve been working with NL-ix since march 2020, so just before the first Covid lockdown. As you can image, the timing wasn’t ideal for getting to know everyone, but now I feel very at home. My first project was a classic NL-ix one - making the front-end for our new Elastic Interconnect Manager tool. Elastic Interconnect is a flexible and scalable NL-ix service that gives business users best-class Internet as well as Cloud Connect and SaaS Connect services. At the heart of the product is the ability to create a ’Trusted Traffic Slice’ – basically segmenting traffic before it enters the corporate network. It gives an overview of ports, links and destinations, with information on latency, bandwidth and routes. The Elastic Interconnect Manager really brings the customer network to life.
Afterwards I started working on the website, it came as a bit of a surprise. I was asked along to a meeting in Utrecht with Lab Digital, the web development agency we partnered with at the time. And I have been working on the website ever since! The agency did a great job of the first version and for various reasons we took it on from there. We finished most of the back-end work in cooperation, and then finished the front-end and the styling in-house. Because we took it on ourselves, we now have the know-how to develop all sorts of things with the website in the future.
Our network is the most important thing we offer
Leon Hassing
As our network is the most important thing NL-ix has, I really wanted to emphasise the network on our homepage. It’s the most important thing we offer, and I hope this comes across on the homepage, where you can basically see the NL-ix network in operation with information on all round-trip latencies. The latencies are updated every five minutes, so effectively real-time. Just click on a network node and you’ll see.
Furthermore it is just a pleasure to work at NL-ix. There’s a lot of technology, and that’s why most of us got involved. I like writing code and I enjoy the variety of projects, but it’s the people that make it work. It’s much more motivating to have a human, approachable, manager – someone that listens and understands what I’m talking about - and there’s always room for conversation.
Contact Leon if you have any questions about the NL-ix website: webmaster
