I live in Driebergen, the Netherlands, with my wife and our four sons. Outside of family life, I love travel—especially trips that bring me into conversations with new people and new ideas. Whether I’m traveling for an event or discovering somewhere new as a family, I’m happiest when there are people to meet and ideas to share. That’s also why I care so much about community: I love creating welcoming spaces where people can learn together, connect across backgrounds, and turn curiosity into real-world impact.
My Journey
My first encounter with computers was around the age of six. I can still picture my dad, evening after evening, working behind those magical black-and-green screens. I didn't really understand what was happening, but I knew it was fascinating. I'd sit next to him, type dir, dir, dir, and watch the letters appear as if the computer was answering back.
It got a lot more serious when I was about twelve, when my dad gave me his old 386SX laptop. It ran DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1, and it came with the games that defined that era for me—Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and Doom. Around the same time the internet arrived at our house. With a 14k4 modem, the unforgettable sounds of Trumpet Winsock, and early browsers like Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 2, I watched the first websites slowly load. I was hooked.
In high school I found friends who were just as obsessed with computers as I was, and soon PC (or "cyber") parties were born. We'd play games all day and night—and when things broke, we learned the hard way. Sometimes it took hours to track down the culprit, like the "broken terminator" in our coax network that could take the whole thing down.
By the time I was sixteen, I was already working in a computer shop assembling and configuring home PCs. While building machines, I started learning to code too—beginning with BASIC and Pascal—and slowly realized I didn't just want to use technology, I wanted to build with it.
Roughly twenty years later, I'm still hooked—especially on the internet, and on creating software. After earning my MCSE and helping update a lot of machines for the millennium bug, I gradually moved from system administration into web development. I ran my own web company for many years, and eventually chose to join larger teams so I could contribute to bigger projects. Over the last several years I've worked with larger organizations like Mirabeau and Ordina, contributing to large-scale development efforts.
Today, that same curiosity has evolved into a career focused on cloud, AI, and community. I work as a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, I teach as an online instructor for A Cloud Guru, and I spend a big part of my time building communities—founding initiatives like the Global AI Bootcamp and Global AI Night, and running user groups like Azure Thursday, AI Night, and the Dutch Umbraco Usergroup. I also love sharing what I learn on stage, and I've given 40+ talks in the past year.
When I look back, the thread is pretty clear: I've always loved exploring what's possible with technology—and I've always enjoyed doing it together with others. The tools have changed a lot since those green screens and dial-up modems, but the feeling is the same: curiosity, momentum, and the joy of building something that works.