Merijn van Wouden, software developer and inventor. Zaandam, NL.
I like problems that ask for a little invention. Interfaces people are glad to open, algorithms that do more with less, research rabbit holes I should probably have climbed out of sooner. The aim is to understand a problem well enough that the solution becomes small.
Most of the work happens in the hours before the first line of code: reading the domain, arguing with the assumptions, hunting for the one sentence that makes half the requirements disappear. What gets built after that should be the easy part, and usually is.
Currently
Legal tech. Lead developer on a platform that walks entrepreneurs through international law. The Hedera network for the records that have to hold, language models for the reading that would otherwise take weeks.
Provenance. Directing a proof-of-originality system on Polygon and Ethereum, so a buyer can check where a product actually came from.
Travel. Lead AI developer on a neural recommender that plans itineraries anywhere in the world.
Live entertainment. Overseeing development at one of Europe's larger booking platforms.
Work I take on
Serverless progressive web apps, and the internal tools nobody writes a case study about. Those get opened every morning by the same twelve people, which is exactly why they ought to be a pleasure to use. I am happy on whatever stack a team already runs: JavaScript and TypeScript, Svelte and SvelteKit, React, Node, PHP, Python, SQL and NoSQL, and plain HTML and CSS done properly.
Background
I studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam (BSc, 2009 to 2014). Machine learning, neural networks, recommender systems, language.
languages Dutch and English daily, fluent in Russian and German, some French and Turkish.
Elsewhere