Hey! I’m Robert, 28 years old and a software engineer at the RDW. I currently live in Zwolle, the Netherlands.
On September 8th, 1996, I was born at the Delfzicht hospital in Delfzijl. At the age of 11, I started high school (VMBO TL+) at the Hogelandcollege in Uithuizen. During my time in high school I also learned how to program in PHP, mainly by modifying parts of the source code of Simple Machines Forum (SMF). SMF is an open-source forum software that is still available today. The people there have inspired me greatly.
Not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to study Front Office Management at the Noorderpoortcollege in Groningen. Dreaming of living in Spain one day, my plan was to do one of the internships there. With a lot of help from my Spanish teacher, I got the opportunity to do not just the third-year internship in Spain, but the fourth-year internship as well. I ended up spending ten months in the comunidad of Galicia. Since completing the internship I have revisited Galicia at least three times.
As much as the internship was a fantastic experience, already in the second year of my studies I knew that continuing in the world of hospitality was not something I wanted to do. During the internship I had a plan to work as a freelance PHP developer after graduation. However, in March 2016 I started considering to keep studying. While my original plan was never continuing with an HBO-level study, the idea of studying IT at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences was quite appealing.
During my time at Hanze I learned a lot about software development. My third-year internship concerned the development of a cross-platform mobile application, while my graduation project involved finding a way to automate accessibility assessment based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
In June 2020 I graduated from Hanze. Having already completed the pre-master’s program during the minor period of my bachelor’s degree, I then enrolled at the University of Groningen for the Computing Science master’s program. Since almost all of the first year took place online, I decided to postpone my thesis by at least one semester. This allowed me to take a variety of other courses, without having to pay attention to whether or not the credits would count toward graduation. In june 2023 I graduated from the University of Groningen as well.