Born and raised in Wijchen, I wrote my first code on a Texas Instruments calculator in high school and got drawn into programming completely during my bachelor’s in Artificial Intelligence at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.
I went on to doing my master’s in AI at Radboud as well, where I focused on the chances of AI in the domain of natural language and the internet in general.
My graduation project focused on applying machine learning to search, a technique commonly called learning-to-rank. This technique is getting used more and more by search engines to optimize their algorithms, and as a result has many implications for SEO as well.
After a (very brief) stint as a developer at a marketing tech firm, I switched to Yoast, where I am currently working as a web developer in the platform team.
The internal linking suggestions tool has been a staple of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin since 2017. After all these years it was time for an overhaul. In a dramatic turn of events, we actually took some lessons from the way search engines work. Ultimately, this led to a little internal search engine of our […]
Read: "Linking suggestions, a look behind the scenes"
Testing WordPress plugins can be difficult, especially during development, when you want the feedback loops to be small. A local development environment can help. This enables you to test your plugin on a local WordPress installation, running on your own computer, without the need for a live website. However, setting one up can be difficult, […]
Read: "Setting up a WordPress development environment in Docker"
The content analysis is a staple of our SEO plugin. We do our best to provide you with the best insights on how you could make your texts more readable and search-engine-friendly. In order to be able to give you this valuable feedback, we need to do a lot of computations. A logical solution would […]
Read: "Web workers: Why and how we use them"
Function components in React are awesome. They let you create a component without the overhead and extra code of a class. However, up until recently, class components did have an edge over function components. Specifically: class components could have state, whereas function components were doomed to be stateless. Now, with the addition of hooks in […]
Read: "An introduction to hooks in React"
