Creative
Coder

I grew up making music, the kind of kid who turned a corner of the house into a studio and never really moved out of it. Somewhere along the way I picked up code, and the two never felt like separate things to me. A song and a piece of software are both just systems you shape until they feel right.

These days I'm based in Amsterdam and I wear a few hats: music producer, creative coder, gadget freak, AI nerd. I produce sound, design sonic identities for brands, build web apps and tools, and tinker with hardware on the side. The common thread is simple: I like making things for and with people. To inspire them, to help them, to make life a little easier. And I like making them better than they were yesterday.

The other half is a stubborn belief in creativity and moving forward. Not change for its own sake, but the quiet drive to take something that works and ask what it could become. I'm happiest right on the edge of what's possible, where a new tool or idea suddenly lets you do a thing you couldn't do last year, and then hand that to someone who needed it.

I don't really separate the artist from the engineer. The same instinct that hunts for the right chord hunts for the right architecture. I love spotting connections, the moment two unrelated things click into one, and then building the bridge between them. Most of my favourite work started as "wouldn't it be cool if these two worlds talked to each other."

And I try to stay human about it. Tools, including AI, are only worth anything if they give people back time, attention or a bit of delight. I care about craft, but I care more about whether the thing actually lands for the person on the other end.

The studio side of me lives at THNDR, the sonic branding studio I founded in 2020 and grew into a small, hands-on team in Amsterdam. The idea behind it: if you want to be recognised, you need to be heard. We build sonic identities, compose original scores, design sound, and build the custom audio tools and AI systems that keep a brand sounding like itself everywhere.

Our flagship is the new sound of VanMoof: a sound logo, a touch-responsive Dynamic Bell, and bespoke software to design and test it all. We even found the bike frame has resonant frequencies, so the sound seems to come from the bike itself. It is the clearest example of my two worlds in one job, audio and creative coding side by side.

When I'm not in the studio I'm building. Eighteen years of writing PHP and JavaScript, these days mostly Laravel, Vue and AI, have turned into full SaaS platforms, internal tools that quietly run businesses, and hardware like Timey, a little live transit display running my own ESP32 firmware with more than 400 units out in the world.

I like the whole stack, from the database up to the last pixel, and I especially like the unglamorous part: wiring messy real-world things together until they behave. You can poke around most of it on the projects page.

I'm genuinely excited about AI, and allergic to the hype around it. What I care about is the boring, useful part: wiring language models and automation into real workflows so the tedious bits run themselves and people get to spend their time on the work that matters. I write about that craft too, including how we navigate AI inside sonic branding.