I started on the factory floor, stacking boxes and preparing orders. Over the years, I learned new parts of the operation whenever the opportunity came along — logistics, planning, production, quality and eventually leadership. Most of that progression happened for a simple reason: I was curious, I learned quickly, and when something needed to be done, I wanted to understand how to do it.
Looking back, there is one thing that has followed me through almost every role I've had.
I like making things work better.
Sometimes that means something small: reorganising a process, building an Excel file or finding a more logical way of working. Other times it means looking at a problem that everyone has learned to live with and asking, "Why are we still doing it this way?"
For a long time, I never really considered that a skill. It was simply how I worked.
Moving from production into Sales & Technical Support changed my perspective. Suddenly I was looking at the business from the other side. Instead of only thinking about machines, planning and output, I was talking to customers, understanding technical problems, preparing solutions and seeing how production, sales and customer needs all connect.
It also gave me more freedom to experiment with ideas.
That is where technology — and more recently AI — became especially interesting to me.
I'm not a traditional software developer, and I don't pretend to be one. What I do have is years of experience with real processes, real customers and real operational problems. AI-assisted development has given me a way to turn that experience into working tools.
Instead of thinking "someone should make something for this," I can now try to build it myself.
And that's exactly what these projects are.
None of the projects in this portfolio started because I wanted something impressive to put on a website.
They started with a problem.
A quotation process took far too long, so I started wondering how much of it could be automated.
We needed an easier way to see which Account Manager was responsible for which part of the Netherlands, so I built an interactive territory map that could be changed as regions changed and searched by postcode or city.
At home, my trading-card collection kept growing and I wanted a better way to manage what I owned, what I had listed for sale and at what price. So I started building my own inventory system that could find the correct card from its set and card number instead of making me enter everything manually.
Different problems. Different environments.
But the thought behind them is always pretty much the same:
There has to be a better way to do this.
Today, tools like AI allow me to take that thought much further than I could before. I can define what I need, experiment, build, test, fail, change direction and eventually turn an idea into something I can actually use.
The technology is exciting, but for me it isn't really about the technology.
It's about solving the problem.