Clinton van Blommestein
Software architect, based in Taipei since 2018. Twenty-four years building production systems on three continents.
I lead architecture for a multi-region platform serving customers across Asia and Europe, with engineering teams in Taiwan, Israel and Australia. Day to day the job is keeping architectural decisions consistent across time zones, languages and engineering cultures. That is the same work I do as an independent consultant.
Before Taiwan I worked in South Africa and Europe. That is where the habit of distrusting whiteboard architecture comes from. Systems behave differently once they carry live traffic, money and a regulator, and most of what I know came from being on call when the difference showed up.
I take on one or two new consulting engagements per quarter alongside my ongoing work.
How I work
IDesign methodology
I derive decisions from where a system is volatile rather than pattern-matching against a reference architecture. Things that change on different clocks belong on different sides of a boundary. I trained under Juval Löwy: Architect’s Master Class and Project Design Master Class in 2019, Architecture Clinic in 2020.
Production scars
Every recommendation here was paid for in incidents, on-calls and cross-border launches. I’ll also tell you when I haven’t done something before.
Plain English
I can explain to the people funding the work why your queue is the wrong abstraction, and explain to a staff engineer why their deadline is the right one. A lot of architecture arguments turn out to be translation problems.
Track record
35,000 transactions / min
On platforms I architect, each one validated inline against regulatory and business rules at production throughput.
14M requests / month
An image delivery service with zero recorded downtime, transforming on the fly for partner companies worldwide.
Asia + Europe
Lead architect from Taipei since 2018, working with engineering teams in Israel and Australia, with production deployments across multiple AWS regions.
Credentials & education
Taiwan MODA High-Level Professional Recommendation
Recommended by the Ministry of Digital Affairs as a high-level professional in the field of software architecture, 2026. A recognition the ministry issues to select foreign experts.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
Scored 911 out of 1000 against a 750 pass mark, held 2020 to 2023. Advanced competency in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure design.
BSc Computer Science, With Distinction
University of South Africa (UNISA). Major in Computer Science and Information Systems, 360 NQF credits.
IDesign Architecture Training
Under Juval Löwy: Architect’s Master Class (2019), Project Design Master Class (2019), Architecture Clinic (2020).
Taiwan Permanent Residency (APRC)
Alien Permanent Resident Certificate, held since 2023. Before that, the Taiwan Employment Gold Card in the Economy field, from 2021 to 2024. I’m not going anywhere, which matters if an engagement runs for years.
Community & speaking
Conference speaker
Couchbase Connect (Silicon Valley), PASS Data Community Summit, and the Durban SQL User Group.
Couchbase Champion
Recognised for contributions to the global Couchbase developer community.
Taiwanese engineers I have mentored now hold senior engineering roles at TSMC and Microsoft Taiwan.
Core expertise
C# / .NET
Backend services, APIs and high-throughput applications on the .NET ecosystem.
Data & messaging architecture
SQL Server, DynamoDB, Couchbase, and NoSQL data modelling. Pub/sub messaging, event-driven architectures, and queues for high-throughput distributed systems.
Distributed systems
Scalable, fault-tolerant architectures using microservices, message queues, event sourcing, and event-driven patterns.
Cloud architecture
Cloud-native design for multi-region production workloads on AWS.
A note on language
My working language is English. I don’t speak or write Mandarin, so an engagement with a Mandarin-only team needs an English-speaking bridge. Usually that is a bilingual team lead or engineer on the client side, or a paid interpreter for the sessions that matter. Most foreign-owned subsidiaries in Taipei already run in English internally, so for that shape of engagement it rarely comes up. Better to say it here than have it surface in week two.
我是常駐台北的軟體架構師，提供架構評估、系統設計、AWS 雲端遷移與技術顧問服務。諮詢以英文進行，目前不提供中文諮詢，敬請見諒。
Work with me
Four ways in: an architecture review of the system you have, system design for one you are about to build, AWS migration architecture and sequencing, or ongoing technical consultancy.
Get in touch to start a conversation.