About me
Senior front-end + CRO. Twenty-three years building, maintaining, and rescuing things on the web. The client roster — past and present — lives on the Work page. What follows is the personal version.
What I do today
Two parallel things. Mintminds is the experimentation partnership I co-founded in 2016 — A/B testing, personalisation, and the in-house GrowthBook Toolbox that runs across six client brands. recoveryArea is my own consultancy, going since 2003 — website builds, migrations, the occasional emergency rescue. Most clients on the Work page sit on one flag or the other.
GrowthBook is the active experimentation platform; we’ve migrated clients off Convert (TSH) and Optimizely (Toom) onto it. Cloudflare sits in front for hosting, edge caching, and the occasional Worker. New sites get built on Astro now — including this one.
The technical work
The interesting parts aren’t the platforms; they’re the seams where experiments meet a host application that wasn’t built to host them. Most of the GrowthBook Toolbox is framework-neutral at its core but ships framework-aware adapters where it has to. A hydration-aware trigger for LAB’s Remix stack that waits on a small set of independent signals before firing. Defensive re-application patterns for Toom’s market/locale system. Helmet-aware injection for TSH’s React 16 SPA.
Twenty-three years of writing the unglamorous helpers so the next ten experiments are cheaper than the last.
AI in the workflow
Claude Code is wired into the development surface, not just an ask-and-paste chat partner. The Toolbox carries three Jira MCP servers and three GrowthBook MCP servers — one of each per active client — so experiments can be scaffolded straight from a Jira ticket. A weekly Dep Guardian session runs an LLM-assisted audit against npm outdated output: patches auto-applied, minor releases reviewed against release notes, majors always prompt. Each experiment carries an about.md so context survives across sessions. There’s a post on Dep Guardian if you want the long version.
Off-screen
Father to Elliot, born October 2012. Twente landscape on a 2021 BMW GS Adventure — particular fondness for the scenic, winding stretches around De Watermolen in Mander that nobody else seems to use. Off the bike: 1,200+ films on Plex (prestige drama, the 80s–90s action golden era, Sergio Leone if I’m being honest), 1,654 records and CDs digitised to lossless, Detroit techno and UK ambient/IDM as the soundtrack to most of the work. Bit-perfect playback or it doesn’t count. Currently mid-build on the LEGO UCS AT-AT (75313) using Rebrickable for stage-based parts sorting — same compulsion as the music library, same payoff.
Where it started
Conrad Electronic Benelux (2011–2015) is where general front-end work turned into specialised conversion optimisation. The pivot crystallised in mid-2015 when the role split into a “CRO Technician” position at Conrad International, then “UX Developer” — and by April 2016 I’d left to co-found Mintminds. One thing Conrad beat into me along the way: the HiPPO doesn’t personally decide which button goes where on an e-commerce platform. Test everything.
Before that: University of Twente Notebook Service Centre (2007–2009) — PHP and JavaScript on the NSC website plus Apple support for staff and students (the Mac OSX Handbook for both still has my name on it somewhere). JB-IT / Sqills (2005–2007) — Joomla! deep specialisation, custom modules and components in PHP. Milos Automatisering (2004–2005) — the web-standards / CSS / XHTML era. And earlier still: Parity Solutions (2000–2003), including a year in Runcorn, England, on a 35-person team for Parity PLC. ASP, JavaScript, Visual Basic — the kind of broad exposure that pays back fifteen years later.
Milestones
- 2003 recoveryArea consultancy begins
- 2007 First major client website goes live (Euroring, Joomla!)
- 2011 Joined Conrad Electronic
- 2015 Title pivot: CRO Technician at Conrad International
- 2016 Mintminds co-founded; went independent
- 2019 DDMA Dutch CRO Award (Mobile category)
- 2020 Dutch Search Award (best CRO campaign)
- 2026 recoveryarea.nl migrated to Astro; 900+ lifetime experiments
Currently based in Enschede, in the Twente region of the Netherlands.