About

I'm Kevin van Zonneveld, co-founder of Transloadit—a file processing service trusted by Coursera, The New York Times, and thousands of developers worldwide. We were among the first commercial Node.js companies, bootstrapped from day one, and I've been running it with a distributed team for over 15 years.

I also co-created tus, an open protocol for resumable uploads now used by Apple, Cloudflare, and soon part of all browsers and servers thanks to IETF adoption. Before that, I built Locutus (formerly php.js), where 600+ contributors wrote 400+ functions. Along the way I've contributed to Node.js core, Terraform, Docker Compose, and released projects like Uppy, bash3boilerplate, and cronlock.

When I'm not writing code, I'm teaching kickboxing, woodworking, or exploring Amsterdam with my family by boat.

This blog started in 2007 as a way to document what I learned—for my future self, for others hitting the same walls, and to sharpen my thinking through feedback.

Background

Before Transloadit, I spent 8 years at True, a Dutch hosting provider, where I led R&D and architected their AWS EC2-like cloud platform. That's where I learned to build distributed systems that don't fall over at 3am.

Selected work

Transloadit (2009–present) — Co-founded and run the company. File uploading, encoding, and delivery at scale.

tus.io (2013) — Co-created the open protocol for resumable uploads. Now an industry standard.

Uppy (2016) — Open source file uploader. 27k+ GitHub stars.

Locutus (2007) — Stdlib functions from all languages ported to JavaScript. 600+ contributors over 5 years.

bash3boilerplate (2013) — Templates for writing safe bash scripts.

Contributions

Node.js core, Terraform, Docker Compose, Packer, Vagrant, NixOS, and many more.

Earlier

• 2004: Joined True as a sysadmin, left as R&D lead
• 1998: First dev job at Ineas, Europe's first online insurer
• 1992: Wrote my first program in QBasic with my dad
• 1983: Born in a small village in The Netherlands