I'm a hands-on leader. I like clear goals, a steady release rhythm and a team that enjoys the craft.
Reliable delivery, automated
I've set up CI/CD pipelines from scratch with open-source tooling for fast beta feedback. At Marktplaats I built a Jenkins pipeline that delivered daily internal betas, with change-logs generated from Git commit messages, and led the move to test-driven development, taking new and refactored modules from zero to almost 100% code coverage. At Sportlink that mindset ships 16 app flavors every two weeks through an automated pipeline, with per-flavor feature toggles for gradual rollouts. The goal is simple: releases should be routine, not events.
AI and software factories
Much of Sportlink's backend is written in Navajo, a service framework from Dexels with little debugging support. So I built Claude skills and agents that teach AI to work in it, then had Claude set up a local test harness: every change is checked by comparing API responses before and after, or against expected output for new endpoints. It covers far more combinations of input than manual testing ever did. A sizeable part of our backend work, including the API changes for the apps' redesign, went through it, and delivery got faster. That is the idea behind software factories: automated, agent-assisted pipelines that take a change from idea to verified release, with people setting the direction and reviewing the result. I'm also learning about self-hosted LLM inference.
Small team, big output
At Sportlink my team was seven people: a product owner, three developers across app and backend, a QA engineer, a technical analyst and me. Small, senior and automated is how that team ships 16 apps every two weeks.
De-risking big changes
I'm driving the move from a proprietary login to Keycloak (OAuth2) across the apps, with months of internal testing behind it. I wrote the DevOps tickets for the production deployment and audited the service that stores the apps' login tokens. Per-flavor, per-platform feature toggles allow a gradual rollout, and English and Dutch test guides let each federation prepare its own organisation before go-live.
Hands-on depth
I've worked from mobile to backend for 20 years, and I built the full Swift and Vapor backend for my own app, Instint. That lets me have real technical conversations with every part of a team.
People and partnership
I like joining early: I was the second iOS engineer at Booking.com and helped recruit the people around me. I mentor engineers, lead distributed teams, and work with clients, product owners and the service desk to keep support SLAs healthy and changes smooth.
