Origins

My first job was injecting CSS into MySpace pages to make them more metal. I turned a death metal band’s profile red and black; they gave me €20. A passion was born. I’d infiltrated the music scene without playing an instrument, specializing in websites and album layouts. (I did eventually pick up a synthesizer and bass, but that’s another story.)

I formalized my media design itch with a Bachelor of Arts in International Communications in Groningen (NL), studying media, marketing, and cultural theory. Along the way, I took a detour into education to become an elementary teacher. Turns out, I’m good with kids, just not when there are thirty of them at once.

The scenic route

In my third year of university, I relocated to Stuttgart, Germany, where I stayed on as UX Designer for Bitfactory GmbH. Eventually, being fed up with southern Germany’s reluctance to modernize, my wife Julia and I craved a new challenge, landing us in the northern Netherlands.

I joined Kaios (now AI-InfraSolutions) as a Product Owner, but at an AI-focused company, I found myself missing the visual craft of human interfaces.

That hunger led me to Comecer Netherlands, where I served as Product Owner for both legacy software and Smartlab, a new platform automating workflows for radio-pharmacists moving from paper to digital.

Today – “anti-finacial stress”

Today, I’m the Experience Designer at Stichting NSR, a nonprofit helping people navigate or avoid financial debt. I design and refine the journey for our recipients, applying everything I’ve learned to work that helps people breathe easier. We've got a long way to go, but we're making progress.

In the meantime, we moved to Arnhem, in the middle of the Netherlands.

You can learn more about my professional experience on my resume.

Off the clock

I’m pathologically early to rise, usually up by six and winding down by nine. The discipline carries through the week, but weekends are when the structure softens without collapsing. I’ll tinker on this site, read about and listen to music, mess with my Homelab, or I’ll drag Loki, our Shiba Inu, into the forest, where he pretends to be a wolf while I pretend I don’t have responsibilities.

Relaxing

Evenings tend to drift toward the familiar. I return to a good book or series like Cheers. There’s something reassuring about a place where everybody knows your name.

Hunger usually strikes at six, ideally for a proper pizza, not the fast-food kind that arrives in twenty minutes tasting of cardboard. Or we keep it Dutch and humble with kapucijners (young peas) and bacon, a weekly tradition that anchors us to something simple.

What gets me excited

The real fuel, though, the thing that rearranges my chemistry, is a sudden musical left turn. An unexpected key change, a progression that shouldn’t work but does, a melody that scales the inside of my skull. Dissonance heck yeah. Microtonal? Sign me up!

Most often, the fix comes from several places: the entropy of avant-garde black metal, the inner-workings of (contemporary) classical, or the electronic pulse of Pet Shop Boys and the like.

Truly, if I could instantly master one skill, it would be orchestration, writing for strings and brass to translate the ideas in my head into something that fills a concert hall. Make people rebel and throw chairs as if it is 1913.

Now

Have a look at my /now page. Which shares what I’d tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a year.