From a bulletin board to my own software company

After 15 years as a scan engineer and project manager, it's time for a new challenge. Next month I start as a BIM consultant at Medisch Spectrum Twente hospital — and at the same time, my own software goes live. A good moment to look back at where it all began: with a 15-year-old and his first computer.

That was around 1980, long before the internet. Most people had never even touched such a machine. I had. And I kept tinkering. About ten years later, around the age of 25, a colleague and I ran our own bulletin board: a system people could dial into with a modem to leave messages and swap files. We took turns each year — one year it ran on my computer, the next on his — so there was always someone to call. I didn't write the software myself; I was a beta tester for it. But I kept it running, hunted down the bugs and thought along. A kind of internet avant la lettre, from my own room.

That tinkering — "how do I get this machine to do something useful, something people actually benefit from" — never left me. Long before I knew you could make a profession of it, I was already up to my ears in the technology: testing, tinkering, figuring out how it worked.

I'm not telling this to show off, but because it explains everything that came after. I've always been a digital all-rounder — a builder and a tinkerer. The software I build today, decades later, comes from that exact same curiosity.

Over the coming weeks I'll take you along: from that bulletin board, through a serious setback and the drawing board, to the tools I eventually started building myself.

Next: how a worn-out back sent me back to school in 1999.