Born in the Netherlands, and currently living in Amsterdam. I started coding at about 7 years old, but really started when I was a teenager and a family friend provided me with documentation and software; Remember this is pre-Internet and the other option was public the library or buy books yourself. Using this is when it really started. I love to eat quality food. That's why I taught myself to cook good quality food based on the raw materials. To me cooking is relaxed, and enjoying the result with family and/or friends makes it even better. Another passion is music. I have been playing the piano since I was a kid, mostly classical music. That gave me a good (tonal) ear. Mixing 1970s--1990s music has been another passion, but because time is limited I only listen to other people's mixes. In order to make good remixes you'll need good material. One of the sources to make great mixes is: multitrack tapes, where all drums, instruments and vocals are on separate tracks. Listening how musicians played the guitar, sang the vocal stacks, and hearing what exactly went on in the recording studio, that's epic.I love cats, luckily my neighbour's cat Lizzy understands this and she comes to visit me when I work from home. She simply joins me, asks for attention, and then she lies down and goes to sleep next to me. How things work?In the 1990s computers were slow compared to current computers. As I always loved computer graphics and programming visual effects most coding was to make animated visual effects. For example, writing an algorithm to crossfade two full color images in a fixed 256 color pallette in a few 80x86 instructions per pixel. In order to know how things work I've reverse engineered/ decompiled many many pieces of software on PCs. Later on I also reverse engineered firmware and/or patching hardware, eg. my satellite receiver. Yep, that includes using a soldering iron. The goal was mainly to see and understand how it works, and/or patch it to make it work how I wanted it to work.Later in life I got another hobby: Trading stocks, options, etc. using algorithms and automation. In order to be successful you have to understand how the market works, how orders work, when to avoid trading (news events), etc. This provided the knowledge how to deal with timeseries at scale, distilling recurring patterns, back testing, etc.That's why I love fighting fraud in the digital marketing ecosystem: It's algorithm based, unstructured, diverse, unpredictable, huge scale, international, and you can really help to improve your client's results.