Who am I?

Hi, I'm Roelof Jan! I'm a full-stack developer in Groningen and I enjoy a challenge. I'm currently working as a lead developer at Tubber, a platform to facilitate C2C, C2B, and B2B boat rentals all over the world. I found my challenge in learning and applying new technologies to solve increasingly complicated problems. As a full-stack developer, the problems I'm trying to solve are of a very wide nature. The problems range from cutting the boot time of a website in half to coming up with ways to build the platform in such a way that real-time availability of boats and booking data is possible. Even when you're working with a system that pulls its data from 5 to 10 different sources.

This drive to learn really started at school, where I wanted to become a graphic designer but ultimately gave this up. Graphic design wasn't for me, but I had found something else that caught my attention: web development. Feeling behind my peers who were doing an bachelors program in IT, where as I was doing Interaction design, I spend a lot of my time on learning. Doing this, I taught myself to pick up new programming languages and techniques very quickly. In the end, I finished my bachelor's degree in Interaction Design, but I found a job as a backend developer.

My shift to Full-stack development

While starting my job as a backend developer, I quickly found out I was very interested in building the user interactions as well as the server architecture. Luckily I had some experience with Interaction Design. This interest drove me to learn AngularJS and ReactJS. Later, when AngularJS became outdated, I learned the "new" Angular and converted the entire Tubber platform to this new framework. Through the years, I have shifted from a backend developer into a full-stack development role and this is where I find most of my energy and motivation. I'm happiest when I can work on backend tasks in combination with some full-stack tasks like creating basic user interfaces and building the user interaction. Designing these interfaces is not my strongest ability, but implementing designs is no problem any more.

All in all, I'm a self-motivated person who loves to learn new things, experiment, fail, and learn again. If you've had a look around this website, you will have found my blog posts, recent projects, and open source work. All these things are ways for me to learn new things, experiment, and perfect my craft.