I was born on February the 9th, 1987 in Dordrecht (The Netherlands), where I started programming in Delphi at the age of 12. While hardly understanding what all the terms means - around 2 years later - I continued with HTML, PHP and basic SQL.
Career
At the age of 16 I spent my holidays coding PHP/mySQL for a webdesign company called Impressed. My educational interests - at the time - were related to electronics. When the college of choice went bankrupt, I decided to work for the same webdesign company 3 days a week, and started learning courses on electronics in the meantine. I have been certified for this, but my interests moved towards web development.
I decided to continue my career as a web developer at other companies. Thereafter I worked for different companies, mainly on homebrewn, closed source applications. Later on, I was contracted by De Pannekoek en De Kale (“The Pancake and The Bold”), where I built online games and minisites which were used for advertising campaigns from well known brands including Pepsi, Marktplaats and ING.
In 2008 I started working for AlterNET, one of the well known Typo3 implementors in the Netherlands. It was the first job where we only used open source solutions.
Nowadays, I work for Dutch Open Projects (“DOP”). As the name says, we specialize on implementing open source solutions. In the first months I worked on Symfony and Joomla projects. After a few months I started Drupal development, which is my daily job these days.
At DOP I work mainly for the NCRV, a public broadcaster who had chosen Drupal to use for all their websites. We have built NCRV.nl (including all its subsites, like Hello Goodbye), Eerste hulp bij recht and a website for the very popular TV program Man Bijt Hond.
For the Telegraaf we have built 4 new websites with local news from Eindhoven, Heino, Woerden and Zwolle. This project includes content aggregation from various sources and a possibility to login with your Hyves, Twitter or Facebook account (on both Eindhoven and Woerden).
I am not only developing at Drupal websites nor do I only code. I also work on technical designs and consultancy for Drupal websites.
Drupal community
It is also worth mentioning that we are very active in the Drupal community. I’ve contributed Hansel as a Drupal module, which was built at DOP (see also my blog post). DOP was also present at, and sponsored several DrupalCon’s and DrupalJam’s. I attended Drupal New Year Meetup 2009, DrupalJam Utrecht 2009, DrupalCon Paris 2009, DrupalJam Amsterdam 2010 and will attend DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010.
Personal interests
My hobbies are ballroom dancing, playing guitar and I exercise once a week. I also do a little bit singing. Besides my hobbies I spent most of my weekend time with my girlfriend Anne, who also plays guitar and sing.