Growing up with homecomputers halfway the 80's, running a BBS on old-school phone-lines at the start of the 90's, it's no surprise that this slacker ended up going into the college-system all fresh and hopeful and ends up without a diploma three years later, much the wiser about many things; few of them related to anything to do with the courses I took.

The first job at Cistron Internet Services, in 1998, set the path for the rest of everything that I ended up doing. The era was defined by "internet cowboys" riding the wave of growth for as long as it would last. Engineering went hand in hand with good-and-proper hacking.

As the internet/DSL market consolidated in the early 2000's, I moved with Cistron to become part of XS4ALL Internet B.V.; another group of hackers-gone-big; a little bit more succesful. Larger-scale system-engineering, network-engineering, data-center coordination and technology are unique terrains that ISP's are a perfect training-grounds for.

Meanwhile, next to my job, it also became more and more clear that commonly held hacker-ideals shared among peers were becoming more and more relevant to the general public. Issues like freedom of speech (digital or otherwise), sharing of ideas, decentralization, all are issues that no longer can be seen without taking the digital domain into account.
In 2011, I became bold enough to come and make the hacker-community's 'call to arms' as one of my own goals as well; to start reaching out to the general public instead of simply sitting behind our terminals, being grumpy about the state of the world on IRC.

In 2011, I became one of the founding members of the Amsterdam Hackerspace, 'Technologia Incognita' and currently function as director on the board.
As part of my passions and as part of my work, I enjoy helping people come together into ad-hoc gatherings or virtual groups to work on hacker/OSS-related projects in the contexts of technology and society.