Data Alchemist

I’ve been working with data for over 40 years — long before the term “data engineer” even existed. It started when I was 15 in a local video store, where I went from simple data entry to building my first customer birthday mailings using IBM DB3 queries.

From helping my father structure medical research data in early spreadsheet tools to studying Cognitive Artificial Intelligence with a focus on mathematical logic and distributed systems engineering in 1990, I’ve always been the one who turns messy information into something useful and valuable.

Over the decades I’ve built production systems at Andersen Consulting, created large-scale marketing intelligence platforms (including one of the earliest flexible tag-management systems for the Financial Times), developed machine-learning models for car valuations at Vroemm.nl, set up scientific data management tools at SURFsara/EUDAT, introduced modern streaming and Data Vault techniques at various Dutch organisations, and worked with cutting-edge stacks like Databricks, Snowflake, PySpark and dbt at companies such as Talpa, Rabobank and Booking.com.

From legacy Access databases to real-time recommendation engines and Data Mesh architectures — I’ve seen it all and built it myself.