Meet the team - Martijn

Martijn has been living in Amsterdam West with his girlfriend for many years and comes to NDSM on his bike every day, weather or no weather. An interesting fact about Martijn and what most of us didn't know is that he worked as a fireman for 8 years. At 18 he followed in his father's footsteps and eventually managed to get the rank of Chief Fireman. For Martijn this was the ideal side job, on weekends he often slept at the barracks and was able to study in between putting out fires. When he started Unc Inc in 2006, it was no longer possible to combine the work and he hung up his firefighter's helmet.

During my studies I met Roderik and we did occasional freelance assignments together. Through him I then got to know Floris, who did design assignments for clients, and shortly after that I got to know Roel and Barry. We got together a few times and at Barry's place in the living room Unc Inc was soon formed. That was a very good move because when you work together you can suddenly do so much more.

Within weeks we had arranged our own office in Amsterdam Oud West which we called the fishbowl, I'm sure you can imagine. Eventually we missed the contact with the outside world and ended up at A-Lab via via. And that did Unc Inc very well because we gained a lot of new contacts there and it in for a substantial growth of our team.

Last week was a very fun week. For one, we had two deliveries and one of them was Brenger. This platform was already live, but we did an important update. They kept having to make a lot of small minor adjustments manually, which for a growing platform is not very efficient. With this week's go live, a step has been taken to automate part of it, allowing them to focus on other things.

The second major go live is that of Hoodhunt. This platform was also already up and running, but they sought media attention last week. I'm mostly looking at statistics right now. Very cool to see an immediate upward trend in visitors and actions on the site. In addition, these statistics are also useful because you can draw conclusions from strange numbers and thus easily detect errors.

Currently we are also busy with self-development. Together with the enthusiastic people at Dream Kitchen, we have an intensive session every week in which we are defining our new proposition and positioning. Important in this is that we are going to formulate how we work best with clients and which way suits us best. When you get the maximum energy out of a project and the cooperation, this also delivers the best end result for the customer.

The biggest one I don't know well, but a very silly blunder is that I once accidentally took down a client's site. I thought I was working on the test server, but apparently I was logged into the live environment. And when I also entered the wrong command, the site went down. Fortunately, I had it back live in no time.

That together we have the same goal in mind: Together you make more fun things than you can alone. Our team feeling is very strong. We really are an Unc Inc family and that's how we always introduce ourselves during job interviews. family first. Not only does this have a positive and motivating effect internally, but clients notice this as well. We regularly receive feedback that our way of working together gives them a personal feeling.

For me, Brenger is a good example of how we like to work with our customers. Important to our way of working with them is that we started small (Minimum Viable Product, MVP) which allowed us to launch a first version fairly quickly. By listening carefully to the users' wishes, this allows you to implement improvements in phases.

We have addressed before that food at Unc Inc is a thing after all. We all love good food and in addition, we find lunch together an important contact moment. Recently Martijn made a special lunch, a vegetarian curry. Martijn has been vegetarian for 10 years, started when he went to Thailand and was warned by an acquaintance about eating meat at small roadside stalls. Having eaten vegetarian his entire trip without fail, he has stuck with this. So now he makes the most delicious vega curries and even the biggest Unc Inc carnivores have had a second helping of their plates.

Hacker News, nice geeky :)

I think the Rijksmuseum website is really brilliant! We've done other projects for them, but to their own website I would have liked to live too. The entire collection plus the national archives can be found online here. You can zoom in to the millimeter and even search by color. In addition, all works are royalty free, so you can have your favorite work printed through the site for your home.

I would like to put Harmen forward. I would like to ask him to give us a glimpse into his kitchen as a UI/ UX designer.