Hello, I'm Sander
I am a -year-old front-end developer born and raised in a small town called Castricum which is located in Noord-Holland. Moved in together with my girlfriend in the city of Leiden, Zuid-Holland.
San Gimignano, Italy 2022
My Journey
I started getting into coding at the age of 15 and I have to admit, it was mostly since I was playing a lot of games and always wondered how they worked in the background. At 16 I decided to follow this curiosity and apply for software engineering education on MBO Niveau 4 and learned a lot mostly about the basics of both backend and front-end. At the end of this training I was able to write android apps in C# and fully functioning websites with the use of HTML, CSS, PHP5 and SQL.
Still at that time, my skill set didn't feel complete. So, I decided to take it up a level by signing up for a second education, this was Communication & Multimedia Design at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. This training was more focused on front-end and design which at the time wasn't my strongest skill. During this training my knowledge of HTML5 and CSS was at 100% and I also gained the skill of fully programming in Javascript. Besides coding I learned the basics of design and noticed that I liked to think about how the user guides through my website or app, also known as UX. This training and also my internships came to be very valuable for my career as I landed my first job as a front-end developer at QStylez while I was still studying. I mastered the skill of turning a design into a fully functioning website there.
However I noticed that I got annoyed by the tech stack this company used since this was just HTML, CSS and JS. I was aware there were way more ways to build websites and also improve coding speed and web performance. I started learning frameworks like React, Tailwind and also write my own in SASS framework. Nowadays I like to keep up to date with new technologies and new ways to improve my coding skills. At 24i I got to experiment a lot with new technologies since I had been working on improving the speed of their web apps. Hence the POC in LightningJS.
Beyond Code
In my spare time I like to do hobby projects to improve daily life. These are things like building my smart home, creating a recipe swiper from my personal notion database or just experiment with AI or google home. Besides all the tech stuff(let's not pretend that's the only thing I do). Of course a beer every now and then is something I appreciate. And this is usually done with the company of my friend group of 11 people or by my girlfriend. A good film or serie is the best way I like to relax or even still sometimes a game in the genre of RPG. Besides sitting behind a desk or on a couch I like to do racket sports e.g padel, tennis or table tennis or go for a run. This sometimes is in the form of a running event. Also last year I discovered the magic of hiking on a 8 day hike in Norway. To put it short, I like to compensate for all those hours sitting down.