About
I am a Dutchman living in London. I work as a Software Development Manager at Amazon.
I enjoy solving problems, and use my experience across tech and design to help teams deliver results.
In my spare time, I enjoy reading, running and baking bread.
The long version
As far as I can remember, I’ve used computers to create things and solve problems. The first computer I used was the Macintosh Plus, and I remember “drawing” with MacPaint (see here for an emulator).
At 11 years old, I was introduced to Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash (Macromedia Studio MX 2004 specifically). This was an exciting time, as it made me aware of interactive media. You could make things move and dance on the screen!
I continued to learn and code, and started getting paid to build WordPress sites and write Flash tutorials. I liked this field of work, and felt I needed to improve in (graphic) design. I chose to study this at the University of the Arts London, and moved to there, from Amsterdam.
I did not learn much at university, but it did open doors. One of those doors was a (paid) internship at a Fintech startup. I ended up joining as the second employee, but chose not to follow the footsteps of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and still finished university (this is clearly why I’m not a tech billionaire).
With a talented team, we built financial analytics products which we sold to Wall St. banks and hedge funds. Despite these sales, there wasn’t (enough) product-market fit and in the end all staff was laid off before the start-up was sold. A good introduction to the challenges of building tech products!
I then decided to start a consulting company, providing UX and front-end development services to companies. It was off to a good start: I won my first contract and I already was signing more clients. In 2016, I got a call from Amazon and I decided to drop everything for the opportunity.
I‘ve been part of Amazon ever since, and held roles as a Design Technologist, Technical Program Manager and now Software Development Manager. Despite the roles and responsibilities changing, one thing has remained true: I use computers to create things and solve problems.