My dad took me along to his office and sat me down at his computer. The keyboard wasn't plugged into anything, but that didn't stop me from being completely convinced I was using a computer.

My dad bought a PC through some scheme at work. A colleague of his sold Twilight CDs: discs full of ripped games and software, basically torrents before the internet. To install any of it you had to use MS-DOS, so that was the first time I typed commands at a prompt.

I started messing with all sorts of MS-DOS games by editing their config files. Without knowing it I was learning what a project's file structure looks like and what a variable is.

Mostly I gave myself extra lives and swapped out car textures and sounds.

At a friend's house his older brother showed us QBasic: a few lines of code and you could make a character move across the screen in a loop. I was amazed.

I started making animations in QBasic, drawing circles and ASCII smiley faces and moving them around the screen.

One of them was an ASCII friend of mine whose head lifted off his body, flew across the screen and headbutted some kid clean out of frame. Best thing I had ever made.

I taught myself Pascal by just going at it. No books, no lessons, no idea what I was doing. Write something, break it, write it again until it worked.

I never built anything real with it, but I couldn't leave it alone.

Four years of ICT at the ROC, the Dutch vocational college.

Even though I quickly realized that managing computers and networks was not my thing, I did realize that writing and building new things (software) of my own really was my thing.

Halfway through school I started making Flash games in ActionScript, hosted on a webserver I ran myself.

Nothing fancy, but it was the first time other people used and played something I built.

Straight after graduating I started as a junior developer at SMScity, a site with over a million active users back then. The thing I remember most is an SMS scheduler I had to build that could handle millions of messages in a few minutes on New Year's Eve. So instead of watching fireworks I was watching my script send them, which for me was way cooler to see than fireworks.

It was also my first brush with payments: I built a 0900 (IVR) payment method so people could buy SMScity credits by phone.

At Creative Group I built a custom e-commerce platform from scratch for Condoomfabriek: products, stock, checkout, payments. PHP and Doctrine on the backend, and a frontend that turned the API's XML into XHTML with XSLT. Separating backend from frontend only became a thing years later.

The fun part: one shared basket across condooms.nl, vibrators.nl, dildos.nl and friends. Cookies are per domain, so keeping your basket when you hopped between shops took some creativity.

Beltegoed.nl was one of 25 labels (recharge.fr, guthaben.de, mobiletopup.co.uk and 22 more) running on one Zend Framework app. I barely touched the websites themselves. Instead I built the payment platform behind all of them, with local payment methods, currencies and exchange rates per country.

It talked to Buckaroo, Worldpay, Docdata, Ogone, Adyen and more, so we could always pick the cheapest PSP and switch during an outage. At the time 1 in every 150 iDEAL transactions in the Netherlands went through it.

We created a small team of Ruby on Rails engineers and built recharge.com on top of Spree Commerce. My first Rails project, and I loved it: a multilingual webshop in eight languages, products for 200+ countries, and it had to handle at least 50k orders a day.

RabbitMQ, Sidekiq, Redis and AWS kept everything running smoothly for our customers.

Nine months off to travel. I flew to Moscow, took the Trans-Siberian to Mongolia, crossed China and Southeast Asia, and ended up in Australia and New Zealand.

Keep scrolling: the whole trip is told on the globe after the timeline.

A new project at Recharge: in 2020 we split product management off into a separate headless service on Sylius (Symfony). I migrated all products and related data from Spree to Sylius and customised the admin for selling digital goods.

Later I made the REST API OpenAPI 3.0 compliant, and fast enough to handle more than 100k orders a day, with Cache-Tag based microcaching through Varnish and Cloudflare.

In my spare time I'm building a point & click adventure game with my friend Tim: he draws, I code. Made with Unity in C#, it's an absurd love letter to the classic LucasArts games, about a potato called Al and his buddy Pancho who crash their car in the desert on their way to Vegas.

The game is on Steam and the alpha is on its way.

Pro Line makes bait for carp fishing. I built them a Ruby on Rails app to manage recipes, ingredients, stock and label printing, using Trestle to prototype the admin dashboards quickly.

The latest feature: three tablets in the production hall, one per machine, walking the crew step by step through every production run. Fewer mistakes, a better product and a lot less manual work every day.

I decided to go fully freelance. I had already been doing some work on the side and liked it enough to go looking for more, which I found at UNLOQ.

UNLOQ has over a hundred coaches doing leadership coaching at the highest level. I lead the team building Campus, the platform the coaches and their coachees use to communicate, teach and work through a programme together. Rails and Postgres behind it, a React Admin front end talking to it over JSON:API, all running on Azure.

Confidentiality is key, so security is vital: Campus is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant.

FixFin makes software for Dutch insurance and mortgage advisers: clients, policies, mortgages, claims and invoicing in one place. I work on MijnFixFin, the Rails app the advisers and their clients log into every day.

The codebase has been running since 2012 and is still on the latest Rails. Every change has to fit fourteen years of history.