About me

Born in Rotterdam, data always fascinated me. As a kid I played a lot of FIFA, and I was forever filtering and sorting players on sites like Futhead and Futbin, chasing the right stats for the right price. It sparked my obsession with data long before I knew where it would lead.

My path into tech wasn't a straight line. I started out studying programming and, honestly, I wasn't very good at it. So I kept studying, and that's when it clicked: data plus programming was exactly where I belonged. I threw myself into data transformations, data models and visualisation, and then into building machine learning models.

During my first internship, a machine learning role I ended up staying on, the real lesson landed: the models are rarely the problem, the data underneath them is. That's when data architecture clicked for me. A lot of companies aren't actually ready for AI yet, not because their models are lacking, but because their data foundation isn't solid. From that moment I shifted my focus to Data Engineering, because I believe it's going to be one of the most important disciplines in the years to come.