Hi, I'm Michiel

My professional activities and personal life

I'm the co-founder and CTO at Firmhouse, a software platform to run Product as a Service and other service-based subscription models.

In 2019 we raised a round of funding and now we solely focus on helping companies launch subscription, recurring, and memberhip models for their products and services. For example, we help Philips launch several physical health and personal care products "as a service" by having consumers pay a monthly price instead of buying a device.

As part of my day job I'm primarily involved in shaping our near-term product roadmap. I lead the production development together with my awesome team of product designers and (frontend) developers. Besides these management activities, I'm a pretty solid Ruby on Rails developer and take the lead in our infrastructure management and DevOps efforts.

I'm also overseeing our security, IT risk, and compliance efforts and I make sure that our enterprise customers can trust us with the personal data of their customers by defining our own infrastructure and security policies and setup.

I've done my fair share of work in the open source community and in my early days I used to be an active collaborator on the Debian, Ubuntu, and Gnome projects. I have dozens of graveyarded open source projects that I unfortunately don't work on much anymore. You can view any more recent (ahum) open source projects and contributions on my GitHub.

In my personal life I'm a young dad of a wonderful daughter and a newborn son, and husband to my beautiful wife. I enjoy being in nature and around trees a lot :)

I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I quiet actively using Facebook around 2018.