Reuel Feenstra - Software Engineer
My family

I’m Reuel Feenstra.

I didn’t start my career as a developer. I began as a private school teacher, spending 13 years working mostly with intermediate students. I loved helping them learn and grow, and enjoyed finding ways to make learning more engaging and effective. During the COVID-19 years, my skills with technology became even more important as I supported students and teachers in transitioning to digital tools and new ways of learning.

In 2020, I stepped into a vice-principal role at Maranatha Christian School, where I had the opportunity to support staff, work closely with the principal, and help the school run smoothly.

In 2022, I transitioned into software development. While working at Church Social, my role on the team grew. I took on responsibilities such as fixing bugs, building new features, supporting customers, and writing documentation.

Today, I’m a full-stack software engineer specializing in Laravel, Vue, Inertia, and modern PHP, focused on building clean, reliable software that does the heavy lifting and helps people save time, effort, and money.

My journey into software development

2008

  1. Building my first website

    Drawings from a website by Reuel Feenstra

    I would say my software development journey began in 2008 when I built my first website. I first built it using Site Build It (now called Solo Build it) which is a all-in-one platform designed to help entrepreneurs build a website and turn it into an online business.

2010

  1. Markbook: A report card generator

    Markbook report card program

    When I was teaching a class of 30 students, report card season was always overwhelming. To make the process easier, I built a markbook program that significantly sped up my workflow.

2012

  1. Learning Laravel

    Learning laravel

    I started learning Laravel back before it even shipped with built-in authentication or Jeffery created Laracasts. I was drawn to it because I wanted to transform my static drawing website into something dynamic and interactive.

2013

  1. Athabasca University

    Athabasca University

    During my time at Athabasca University, I enjoyed the courses I took. Especially the hands on computer-related courses. They gave me a foundation in core software-development concepts.

2023

  1. Joining the Church Social team

    Church Social Software Engineer Reuel Feenstra

    After over ten years in the classroom, moving into software development was a major shift, from daily in-person interactions to working remotely with the Church Social team. It was rewarding to be able to build features that helped churches.

2024

  1. Building a custom control panel

    candadian and american reformed churches

    I wrote a custom backend admin panel with Jonathan Reinink for the Canadian and American Reformed Churches which allows administrators to post content like news items to the front end website and allows church leaders login and update their church data.

2025

  1. Vincentians: A simple app that allows volunteers to track their visits.

    Vincentians a Laravel app

    I had a lot of fun designing and building an app for Vincentians that simplifies tracking community visits and distributing vouchers, helping them focus on making a difference in my community.