Standing on good shoulders.

Collaboration

CrossBreeze — building Model-Driven Data Engineering together.

I've worked closely with CrossBreeze and its founders, Harmen Wessels and Willem Otten, on Model-Driven Data Engineering. I first met them on the Rabobank project, and later invited them to help build the MDDE framework at de Volksbank / ASN.

Their CrossModel tooling — open-source, logical-model-first, generating schemas and transformations from metadata — is MDDE in product form. A genuine meeting of minds on the same vision: structure first, generate the rest.

crossbreeze.nl →  ·  crossmodel.io →

Personal knowledge management

The other half of my structure.

Data architecture taught me rules and governance. PKM taught me linked, markdown-native thinking. Both turned out to be groundwork for the AI phase — the vault that organises my knowledge is now the context the model reasons over.

What drives me

Systems, models, and a positive mindset — it's how I'm wired.

This isn't a reading list. It's intrinsic to how I think and work — the same operating system in my personal life and my professional one. See the system, find the model, build the structure, stay growth-minded. I don't switch it off when I leave the data behind; it's how I approach a project, a trip, a year, a life.

Manifestos I stand by

A few statements of principle — technical and human.

I like manifestos. A good one compresses a way of working — or a way of living — into something you can actually hold onto. These shaped mine.