About

What I Do

Every day, I help make WordPress sites blazing fast. I run a premier WordPress agency called Truer than North, where we focus exclusively on performance and scalability for e-commerce and publishing websites. We build fast, secure, and scalable solutions using custom themes, custom plugins, and deep WordPress expertise—all in the relentless pursuit of speed and scale.

I’m also the co-founder of Scanfully, a startup I launched with Barry Kooij. Scanfully is your centralized Performance & Site Health monitoring service for WordPress. With just one dashboard, it gives you uptime monitoring, SSL certificate tracking, performance alerts, Site Health change notifications, and off-server activity logs—all in real time.

Why WordPress?

The TL;DR?

Came for the software, ended up with a family™.

I’ve been using WordPress since late 2004, and professionally since early 2006. I started getting involved with the WordPress Community in 2007, and I’ve been all-in ever since.

I’ve contributed across the board—community, translations, forums, infrastructure, and even a bit of core. But my sweet spot is where the tech and the people meet: scaling WordPress and empowering those who build with it.

WordCamps & Community

I’m one of the co-founders and co-leads of the first two WordCamp Europe conferences (Leiden and Sofia), which helped catalyze the European WordPress Community. We went from 832 tickets in 2013 to over 1,100 the following year—and haven’t looked back since. I’ve continued to help shape and support WordCamp Europe through subsequent editions in Sevilla, Vienna, Paris, Belgrade, Berlin, Porto, Athens, Torino, Basel, and now Kraków.

In the Netherlands, I helped organize the very first WordCamp Netherlands in 2009 and led four more editions after that. I also initiated WordCamp Noord-Nederland, a regional event born from the collaboration between the Groningen and Fryslân meetups.

I’ve lost count of how many WordPress Meetups I’ve attended or spoken at. These small but mighty gatherings have always been the heart of the WordPress community for me. Currently, I’m co-organizer of the WordPress Fryslân Meetup.

I was also proud to be invited to the inaugural, invite-only WordPress Community Summit in 2012—a gathering of the 100 most influential WordPress Contributors at the time.

Polyglots, Translations & Forums

From 2012 to 2014, I served as Global Polyglots Team Lead, succeeding my good friend Zé Fontainhas. I’ve also been the lead for everything Dutch on WordPress.org since 2008—translations, forums, releases. For a very long time, I even zipped and shipped the Dutch release packages manually. (Things have thankfully improved since.)

I also single-handedly translated WordPress into Frisian. Why? Because there’s nothing more satisfying than working in your native language. Even if you’re the only one doing the work.

I continue to oversee the Dutch support forums and help maintain a high standard there—especially by keeping spam and chaos at bay.

Other Roles & Recognitions

• Admin of the Dutch WordPress forums
• Admin and lead translator for nl.wordpress.org and fy.wordpress.org
• President of Stichting WP Nederland, which supports Dutch WordPress events and infrastructure, and the Dutch WordPress Slack team.
• Former Head of People & Partners at Servebolt
• Former Manager of Partnerships at Yoast

I’ve also spoken at WordCamps across the globe, including:

• WordCamp US
• WordCamp London
• WordCamp Switzerland
• WordCamp Netherlands
• WordCamp Vienna
• WordCamp Norway
• WordCamp Sevilla
• WordCamp Transylvania
• WordCamp Sofia

Within WordPress

Through this platform, WithinWP, I continue to share everything I’ve learned over two decades in the WordPress ecosystem. It includes:

• A podcast called Within WordPress
• A WordPress-focused newsletter
• In-depth courses (with Make WordPress Fast being the first)
• A growing YouTube channel covering the podcasts

If it makes WordPress faster, safer, or more scalable, I probably have an opinion on it, and a way to help.