I am an entrepreneur, adventurer, amateur musician, investor, and armchair philosopher. I grew up in the Netherlands, currently live in Singapore and have also lived in Bangladesh, Myanmar and on Bali. Really love learning new things and jamming on everything I think I know with others. For decades I thought I was not creative, but I know better now.
I'm Head of AI and also look after Customer Experience and Trust at Carousell, the acquirer of my previous startup Ox Street. In 2024 I learned to code with AI. This year I built markjason and Oggie, and an AI agent now runs Magicdoor.ai end-to-end, or so we try. I still write on Substack and here, though less than I used to. See my "now" page for more detail.
I like to put photos of my life and family on my Samsung The Frame, but the official SmartThings app is bloated and usually doesn't work. So I built my own ultra-light iOS-only alternative that does a few jobs very well: actually reliably connect to the TV over wifi, upload photos, set mounts for them, and manage which photo is showing plus the rotation schedule. It is a revelation.
If it's not in my calendar, I will forget it, but changing dates and times on a phone just plain sucks. When I started forwarding messages to my OpenClaw agent for scheduling I was converted, but even the best models are bad with dates and times. I also wanted different agents to share context. Calendar should be everywhere, like copy and paste. So with Oggie you connect Google and Outlook once, and your calendars are available to every agent and device you use.
I built Magicdoor because I got sick of paying $60-80 per month for my favorite AI tools, and it's still the AI app I use every day. It's the first real app I built, and it taught me everything. Because it has a custom backend, it also taught me harness engineering.
Now that AI writes all my code, I barely open code files. But I still sometimes read and edit the Markdown, JSON and .env files around it, and IDEs are too heavy. So I built my own stupidly fast little editor for those files. It went from idea to production in 7 days, and I wrote no code.
Ask a question about your Spotify listening and get a page designed around the answer, instead of a fixed dashboard.
Where I learn web development in public. Next.js, mostly written by hand, deployed the hard way on my own OpenBSD server.
I read a lot, both online and in books. Oftentimes I come across something that inspires me in some way. I keep a collection of quotes that I browse through from time to time.
Here is one random quote from my collection.
I started writing almost daily in 2018. Most of it is for myself, and I don't publish most of it. The stuff I do publish, is spread across LinkedIn, Substack and this website. My blog on this website is an attempt to integrate across platforms.
Here is my latest Substack post:
For a lengthy story of my life, read about me page