About
A one-engineer practice, with the range of a small team.
I'm Norman van der Ploeg, a senior software engineer in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Nanzero Interactive is the name I work under.
The practice
Nanzero has been the name on my own projects since about 2014 — for most of that time, games. I registered it as a business in 2024 to take on contracting, and since mid-2025 the work that matters has been Skadi’s Edge: a performance platform for archery coaches and the athletes they work with, now extended into competition software and the national records list for Archery Canada.
The archery software exists because I shoot. The problems were mine before they were a product, which is a good position to build from — I know what the tools get wrong, and I can test a change against real use rather than a guess about it. There was no market thesis; there was a sport I'm in and software that wasn't good enough.
The work is deliberately full-stack. A coaching platform is only useful if the mobile app is pleasant to use at the shooting line, the backend is dependable, and the coach's dashboard answers real questions. Owning all three means the seams between them get designed rather than negotiated.
Alongside product work, I take on selected client engagements — most recently the rebuilt national records list for Archery Canada.
I've spent 14 years building and shipping production mobile, backend and web systems. The last two years have been Nanzero, and Skadi’s Edge above all, where I'm the sole engineer — 75 archers across four teams with the app installed: a Flutter client live on Google Play and in TestFlight beta on iOS, a Go REST API on Firestore and Firebase, and Svelte dashboards, designed, built, released and operated end to end.
I've led as well as built: four iOS developers at Avenza Systems on a flagship app with millions of downloads, where I drove the Objective-C to Swift migration and raised test coverage from 6% to 35%, cutting regressions release over release. Earlier work spans mobile SDKs used by other developers, regulated gaming backends, and C++ geospatial systems.
I work with AI-accelerated development day to day: agentic coding workflows for boilerplate generation and large architectural refactors, applied to real production code rather than demos.
Experience
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Senior Software Engineer & Founder
Nanzero Interactive
Jun 2024 — present
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Senior Software Developer (Full Stack)
phenoML
Aug 2023 — Apr 2024
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Senior Software Developer / iOS Team Lead
Avenza Systems
Sep 2019 — Jul 2023
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Senior Software Developer (Backend)
CloudStreet Gaming
Jan 2019 — Jul 2019
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SDK Developer
FusePowered / Upsight
May 2014 — Dec 2018
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Game Programmer (Mobile)
Blammo Games
Aug 2012 — May 2014
Technical skills
- Languages
- SwiftObjective-CGoDartTypeScriptC++C#JavaPythonPHP
- Mobile & game
- iOSAndroidFlutterSwiftUIUIKitApp Store / Google Play releaseTestFlightFlameGodotUnity
- Cloud & backend
- Go REST APIsFirebaseFirestorePostgreSQLSQLRelational schema designGCPCloud RunBigQueryDockerNGINXLinux / VPSAuth & authorisationStripeStripe ConnectWebhooks
- Web
- SvelteSvelteKitReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSWordPress
- Practice & delivery
- Technical leadershipCode reviewCoding standardsTest coverageGitCI/CDGitHub ActionsCloud BuildJenkinsTeamCityTerraform (OpenTofu)Staging environmentsAgile delivery
- AI & agentic workflows
- Agentic coding practicesModel Context Protocol (MCP)
- Specialised domains
- SDK developmentGeospatial / GIS systemsPDF processing
Side of the desk
Games, as a hobby.
Game jams, an in-progress exploration game, and the occasional development stream. It is where a lot of the engine, graphics and gameplay experience comes from — but it is not the day job.