Who am I?

Hi! Nice to meet you I'm Daniël, and I'm a Frontend Developer with more than 7 years of experience. My journey to where I am now is definitely not a traditional one. Most people have some sort of IT background, where they've either studied media, or computer sciences. Not me, though... I have a bachelor in hotel management.

How it started

It's easy to say now that I should've done a computer science education, however back when I had a choice I, for whatever reason, hadn't even considered that IT would be a good fit for me. Hotel management seemed cool. I loved hospitality because it brought social contact, fun and people skills, so I went for it.

After 3 years of studying along with an internship in Chicago for 1 year I completed my bachelor and started working in the hospitality industry. I had a few different jobs in Amsterdam for about 2 or 3 years and eventually came to the conclusion: this is not something I'd want to do for the rest of my life.

So.... what did I want? Well, I always had affinity with the web. I dabbed into web development when I was younger making websites, and I figured I might as well try it, right? So I purchased a course from an acknowledged institution in The Netherlands and started studying like no tomorrow.

Next to 10 hours of work per day, I also started learning web development afterwards for 2-3 hours. This went on for about 3 months and was very intense. After this period of time I figured I should have something to show when I were to apply for an entry level position anywhere. In the meanwhile my sister had started to bake sweets, and I figured: why not start a blog?

First steps

And that's how my first website ever came to life. Using WordPress, I made my sister a website and gave it to her as a Christmas gift. She posted on it for years before she eventually decided to stop due to her busy life.

For me, at the time, it was a great thing to show to potential employers. And that's what I did. Around 4 months after I started studying like a mad-man I figured "What the hell" and started applying for entry level Frontend Developer jobs. The very first application I've ever sent out was to 42Functions, and as fate would have it: I was accepted.

During my time at 42Functions I learned a lot of the basics. They built websites mostly with WordPress and Magento 2. This was a great first job for me and I did this for 4 years. The last year or so we started also working with VueJS & Nuxt, and after working with WordPress & Magento 2 for the past 3 it was a breath of fresh air.

After this I decided I wanted to work with component based frameworks full-time. Leaving the entire PHP based technology behind and focusing fully on Javascript and Typescript. After applying to a few different companies, I eventually found OneWelcome. A company that had recently emerged due to a merger between two different companies: Onegini and iWelcome. They specialized in Identity and Access Management (IAM), which is an extremely interesting field. They worked with React, however, and I had no experience with that yet. No matter, component based frameworks are very similar so within a month I was up to speed.

Growth

During my time at OneWelcome I was allowed to create something I had never done before: a component library. Previously they had used MaterialUI to build all of their user interfaces. However, they wanted to have their own, dependency-free library where they had full control over everything as well as theming. This was the biggest challenge I had faced until now and a big part of that was due to accessibility. If you're a developer, then you know: custom UI libraries and accessibility are really hard.

In the next two years at OneWelcome my learning curve shot up exponentially. I helped re-designing an entire Microfrontend architecture where we moved from SingleSPA to Webpack Module Federation. All of the Microfrontends were managed by different teams and built using our component library. We made sure there was an entire release cycle in place and it is still actively maintained and publicly available to this day.

Unfortunately after a year and a half OneWelcome was bought by a gigantic corporation called Thales. This caused the company to become everything I disliked. Without diving to deep into this, after about 6 months or so I had enough. This was not for me, time for something new!

Cue my next job hunt. This time, I knew exactly what I was looking for. In the past 6 years I have grown and learned a ridiculous amount of things. I wanted to find a company that is looking for somebody that likes to take charge and enjoys quality over quantity. And most importantly: wasn't too big. After a few interviews with companies that weren't exactly it, I stumbled on GlobalOrange. Lo and behold, the company wasn't too big, there is a lot of ownership, and they're looking for a Frontend Lead to take charge.

The future

And now I'm part of GlobalOrange since March 2024. It's a company I can pour my heart and soul in with different projects that use ReactJS and NextJS.

What the future holds, nobody knows. All I know is that switching from hospitality to web development was the best decision I've ever made!