The very long version
Chapter 0: Pre-Carreer.
I was born and raised in Belgium to spanish parents. My mother tongue is french, and I learned spanish when I was adult. When I was young, I had to interests: Computers, possibly Architecture (the real one), and Music. I was a DJ when I was a Teenager. Because I was early into music, and later into computer, I was quickly fluent in english and life brought me a german girl, so I could use that basic dutch I had to learn (and now speak fluently) german.
My first contact to a computer was my Commodore 64 at age 11, which my 5-years old brother (and me) really wanted to play. I recall we both invested around 125 € each, while my parents gave us the missing 750 € as a christmas present. I even recall it was waiting outside, because Santa Claus had brought it, although I’m not sure if this was our Atari 2600 (which I still own).
Others might remember we first didn’t get a monitor for this thing. We had to plug it on the TV and so really quickly my parents were sick of not being able to watch TV 🙂 and I invested in a monitor, or I might have had a Black & White TV only for the C64 before that. What I am sure is that we bought it with the 1530 C2N Datassette Player, and others probably also remember we copied the tapes with a regular double-deck stereo Hi-Fi. We also quickly realized the overpriced Data Cassettes could be switched for Audio Cassette that would do it perfectly although I don’t think the 3 digit would be enough for those 60 or 90 Minutes Cassettes.
Sick of the Cassettes, we upgraded to the Disk Drive 1571. I’m not old enough to have had the 1541 (Look at that Motherboard!), neither to have had this crazy Modem where you put the Phone like in War Games. I surely tried once the Cartridges (which I probably still own), but they were expensive and needless to say we didn’t have a lot of original games… Very quickly I discovered you could program your own games, although I stayed at Commodore Basic and nothing more fancy. I would type code from Books. No copy involved or any other thing. At one point I made a POKE loop where you could change the inner and outer color of the screen, and it made like a Disco thing 😉
Not much later, I guess, my dad’s Spanish Socialist Party (not a joke!) organized a Computer Course — probably so that people can get a job easier — and for that, they bought a Computer. I don’t recall what it was, but I guess a real IBM. I’m pretty sure it had one or 2 floppy, and the monitor was monochrome amber. So every saturday (or was it sunday?!) in the morning, we’d be taught Lotus 123, and maybe GW-Basic. I recall the later because when we were given tasks to do I could take over my Commodore-Basic knowledge.
Even more lucky, *someone* had to keep the PC the whole week, and so my dad did, which meant, I could use this PC during the week! At one point though I had to buy my first own PC, which was a Commodore PC-10 III with both a 5,25″ and a 3,5″ Floppy! So yeah, I was never in the Amiga, Atari, or Mac game (until obviously around 2000, when I bought my first Mac!).
The fun peripheral bit is that I bought a Citizen 120D when I had my C64 and you could change the interface so that I could plug it to my PC. Not sure I could still print with it on a modern Mac, but I did buy this Parallel to USB-A cable at one point! And I sold the Citizen at one point.
I later upgraded to a Vobis 486 DX 33 with a blazing 170 MB Hard Drive, which I probably upgraded to a Pentium or something similar when Starting studying Computer Sciences in the late 90s. I did what’s called a “Graduat en Informatique de Gestion” which is 3 years of CS focussed on Economy, I guess. The last part of my study was a 4 months internship where I did Visual Basic 4.0 and quickly 5.0 for the first time. At school, they taught us Cobol, RPG, Assembler, Pascal, and I guess C, but nothing very modern, besides Smalltalk, which was probably too modern at the time, since we even did that on OS/2 Warp.
Chapter 1: The Microsoft Carreer.
At that Internship I met my first mentor at the time, Denis Voituron (Thanks, mate, although we have exactly 0 in Common on the Tech side nowadays).
I don’t remember when I bought my first (and I think only!) Laptop PC, but it was a Packard Bell with — I think — a 14″ Display and — I guess — Windows 95. After my internship at Media Files in Charleroi (doesn’t exist anymore), I started my first Real Job at Glaverbel. After 5 months, I had an offer and switched to a company which I forgot the name, and _they_ fired me after 6 months, mainly because stupid 21-years old me asked for a salary raise after 5 months in the company 😉 I know… I was lucky to be hired by a company in which the Frans Devaere (later known as the ReDaTtAcK Pirate) was somehow my boss. He was my second (and probably last) Mentor, although many other people later were important to me.
Frans gained notoriety in the late 1990s and early 2000s for hacking into the systems of several major companies, including Skynet, Fortis, and the Generale Bank, to expose their poor security measures. To me, he was a Hero before Belgium knew, although he could be a weirdo. I was only half surprised, also about the nickname, because I knew he drank a lot of RedBull!
When I left the company, I went freelance, mostly motivated by Frans, which I owe a lot of my freedom of today, probably. At the same time (Summer of 1999), I met the mother of my 4 kids, which was the women of my life for almost 24 years. When I came back from meeting her (at a youth summer camp), friends of mine back in Charleroi welcomed me by telling me “Your boss is in Jail, he’s the biggest Pirate of Belgium”. Little did I know how much good he did — and not only to show the Banks they little security!
As a freelance I started in the kind of things that I did before: Classic ASP, Visual Basic, and I started teaching stuff like Oracle. Quickly I moved to learn C# and do mostly ASP.NET but also WinForms. Around the same time (this is still at the turn of the Millenium), I got to know Ben “The Sheriff“, which I guess could be somehow considered as a Mentor as well. Ben was a Designer in the Web Agency I worked as a Developer. We were in 2 different rooms, and his was full of Macs, while mine was full of PCs. I recall saying something along the lines of “Apple sucks”, but over time, I got in love with those machines. I’m sure most of the Macs where Beige PowerPC G3s, but there was surely already some iMacs and maybe they even had Blue PowerMacs, I don’t know.
A year later or so, while still earning money mostly with Microsoft Technologies, I contemplated the idea of starting a Web Agency with a B-Boy friend of mine, Julien Roose, one of the Brothers of Namur Break Sensations. It’s unrelated to this professional description, but I’ve been listening to Hip Hop since the early 90s and Julien and I discovered we had not only Hip Hop in comon. So I bought 2 Macs in a row: A PowerMac G4 for me (I think it had 2 processors of 500 Mhz), and a PowerBook G3 for the designer. Sadly, 24 Studios never saw the light of the day. Since we were both 24 at that time, it was the name I had in mind. I got back the Mac from Julien and I guess I sold it.
At the time, I had an online Hip Hop Show, which was playing on Michael Pachen‘s WebRadio: JokeFM. It was called ConeXion, and I had FM-Radio versions of those before first called “Hip Hop Session” at “Radio Tan Que Vive” and MustFM as well as “Le 8ième Art” at Radio Quartz, I think. The later was also the name of our DJ Crew with Joss, Magicut, O-Mix, Freemix and Kool Fresh (Charly King Possee). This was the time I spend a year living in my first apartment in Namur, with fellow CS-Student Carlo Di Salvo.
I stayed in this appartment for about a year, then we spent 3 months in Spain with my Ex-Wife (this was before the kids, just like our 3 weeks trip to Peru in 2005), than I came back to live with my parents in Charleroi for a few months and finally moved together with that women in 2003. I have been living in Germany since then, somewhere around Cologne.
I’m not really sure anymore what I did professionally between 2002 and 2005, but yeah, some Microsoft things mostly, still as a freelancer, and I bought my first PowerBook G4 12″ in 2003. I still own this one. It has a 867 Mhz Processor, crazy 60 GB hard drive, a DVD Burner (!), and runs Mac OS X 10.5.8. I also think I started working every year at Apple Expo in Paris, for Apple, and this is where I met HpTroll, while meeting Vincèn Pujol.
When Podcasts became a thing early 2005 (Thanks mostly to Adam Curry) and I had not done Web Radio since a few years, I was on a Live with Michael Pachen and Marc Lescroart, where I explained them about RSS, they made fun of “Stuff and Stephie” (my Ex-wife) and “L’URSS” 😉 It was fun, but also frustrating to be laughed at, and so I decided I wanted to do a Podcast. I just didn’t know about what exactly. I could have done yet another Hip Hop Podcast, but you know, Artists rights, playing music, … 😉 so I did a podcast about Apple. In French. The first one. I called it “Pom Pom Pom Pom” (like Beethoven’s first 4 notes) and reserved the Domain Pomcast.com, because I thought, it’s a Podcast about Apple, “Pomme” in French!
Praise go to MacG and either MacBidouille or Mac4Ever for speaking about it and making it instantly successful. Today, the nickname StuFF mc (which I brought from my non-carreer as a Rapper, obviously) is mostly associated to Pomcast, of my Conferences (more later).
We had our first kid in 2006 and I was crazy enough to spend the whole year doing basically only Pomcast, rejecting earning good money as a freelancer. This was probably the best year of my life, while I finally had to work again early 2007, because you didn’t make a lot of money with Podcasting, back then.
In January 2007 I went for the first time to San Francisco, for the MacWorld. This is where I met a lot of people, among other things at the MacHeist Party, which you can seen in this legendary (not much) Video of me almost 20 years younger. Little did I know, I was going to assist to the Introduction of the iPhone, because I was “sponsored” as Press. I remember waiting in the Queue with John Gruber, though I had no idea who he was at the time.
I remember gaving up a bit on Pomcast around 2007, while PhilGoud and Pof Magic Fingers mostly took over, but I planed a new Trip to San Francisco in June 2007. My plane was paid from MyDreamApp 2 (which I never had to do work for), and I so I planned a few Interviews, among other things with Woz, and since I was going to be there, even though I wasn’t a Mac Developer yet, I went to my first WWDC!
I did try to become a Mac Developer between 2003 and 2008, but I always had a hard time with Project Builder and Objective-C. Sometimes during Pomcast, I interviewed Glen Aspeslagh from Ecamm, and we quickly became friends, also with his twin brother Ken which I thought he was, when I met him during WWDC 2007. Knowing that I was a Windows Developer, the guys hired me to write a Windows Version of PhoneDrive, their App for the iPhone. This was never done, because I couldn’t figure it out. Still, they agreed to pay me in the form of my first iPhone, around September 2007 I think. I didn’t try to develop for the Jailbroken iPhones, but when the Beta of the iPhone SDK was announced, I was interested, and although I originally didn’t plan to go to WWDC 2008 (because, after all, I was still a Windows Dev), I did it, mostly because many of my friends said I had to be there.
Chapter 2: The Apple Carreer.
About that time I worked (as a Drupal Developer) as a freelancer for EMakina and got to know Brice Le Blevenec, which I only knew from the legendary RTBF (Belgian TV) show “Cybercafé” where I was meeting people on The Palace. I think Julien from NBS was working there as a Designer back in the days. This was just after I came back from WWDC ’08 and so I told Brice “If you need an iPhone SDK Developer, I know how to do it”. This was a great example of “La charue avant les boeufs”, but hey, we were probably a dozen developers in Belgium. He asked me to work on a Prototype of a Stocks App, for which I got paid, but I don’t think it never became something. About the same time, and via someone I knew from Pomcast (he was called “Le Martien” because of his bad internet connection), I could make a proposal to Orange, part of France Télécom, for actually my very first Contact, which was a Memory Game for the Picture Service Pikeo. “Pick & Play” was released after a few months of development, and the main trick for me was buying an existing Memory App (the code) for 500 €, adapting the Obj-C code, and make a bit more 😉 than 500 € with it. Still, I believe one of the reason I won the project competing with big agencies was because I was cheaper.
From then on, I almost never looked back at developing for iPhoneOS, later called iOS, then iPadOS, and in 2011 I taught myself macOS Development (that is, AppKit) and release my first own App called Disk Alarm. It was never a big success, neither was Comments, a Mac App for managing WordPress Comments of multiple Websites, or Fflp!, a multi platform (all those from Apple) game for Kids.
I lost 2 people from Cancer dear to my heart in 2011. My dad from a brain tumor, and Steve Jobs from Pancreas. It might sound weird to you that I list those 2, and surely my dad was more important, but Steve was the common dad we all had. Also, the Keynote in 2011 was I think just the day after my dad died. We knew he only had a few weeks left which is why I cancelled all my plans. Pro tip in this case: you get the money back from the flight with a proof from the Doctor of my dad. Earlier this year I had started to be involved into green politics, for now not yet at the city council, but soon.
I could have never learned Objective-C and Cocoa(Touch) if it wasn’t for Ken & Glen, or for example Frank Lefebvre helping me along the way. Around 2012 I had both a difficult and interesting time. I worked for a fixed price on a few Apps and on one I got terribly screwed because the Target never changed and the Customer ended up being refused by Apple (which I could smell, because he had a Business Model that couldn’t allow the 30 % cut) and he decided not to pay me, pretending the code was bad.
The good part of that time was that because of those different projects, I had to do some Backend Development, and because I was sick of PHP (there was not a lot of Frameworks back then), I learned Ruby On Rails, mostly thanks to the amazing Railscast from the amazing Ryan Bates. This website probably should have a big disclaimer on top though because I don’t think watching at Videos from 2013 will help you today. Oh well.
In 2012 I also developed some of the back end of WhereTo? from friend Ortwin Gentz — with Ruby on Rails. I only did Rails for about 2 or 3 years though.
I say I never looked back at developing for iOS, but this isn’t the full truth. For one, I will come back to that when talking about 2026. The other thing is that I did have to look away from Freelancing in 2014, because the market became very complicated. I interviewed for mainly 3 companies in 2014 and had 3 offers on the table (those were the days…). One for London, One for Berlin and luckily one for Cologne, for Seven Principles, which (mostly thanks for Andreas Muth, my CTO back then) gave me the opportunity to develop directly with Swift in 2014, just after the WWDC.
Side note: I was @ WWDC from ’07 to ’09, I probably didn’t have the money in 2010. I had to skip/cancel in ’11 because my dad . With Seven Principles I went in 2015 and 2017. When I started working for 7P I explicitely required to attend it, but in 2016, they sent other colleagues.
2018 was the last time I was there. I couldn’t go in 2019 because I left the company I worked at, then there was Covid and since they restarted to have the “mini WWDC” I was never selected and in 2026 for the first time, I didn’t even apply, mostly because Trump but also a bit Tim.
So yeah, I was 7,8,9,12,13,14,15,17,18 — that’s 9 WWDC + MacWorld, so 10 times in San Francisco. I had been flying more Co2 than most people, probably …
In 2014, when I started working for 7P, I was also just elected at the City Council of Kerpen for the greens, where I stayed 4 years until we moved to another City (Düren) where I have been living since 2018. I stayed at 7P until 2017, when I got a better offer for Certgate, now AirID, a company which is involved in Secure Access to your computer. Over there, and with all the excitement (and the money) that was with the new Job, I quickly had to give up on Swift because I had to interact with C++, and back in 2017 to 2019 (when I left this company), Swift couldn’t do that just yet, so I had to go over a Briding Prefix and Objective-C++ — so I gave up and after having worked with Swift from pre1.0 to 3.0, I skipped Swift 4.0 and only came back to it mid 2019, with the new Job at e.GO, a local Company building an Electrical Car.
I was fired from e.GO after 6 months for various reasons, one of it being that they were transitioning the App to React Native. This was the first time I took a break in my carreer for a 5 months, when I started working again as a Freelancer with good friend Christian Menschel from Tapwork. We worked on a Project building White Label Apps for Clothes shops for most of 2020, and later I worked for my other friend Bernd on his Fitness App, which I did again between 2024 and 2025.
Late 2020 I had a very good offer to work for DeepUp, where I later brought a few old colleagues in the game. It was amazingly well paid (still is for those guys), but I couldn’t keep the job and left the company after 2 years.
In 2020, after about 2 years in Düren, I ran again for the city- and this time the regional council as well, and got double-elected. I’m still in the regional council for the greens, which means I’ve basically been politically involved since 2011, 10+ of those in Councils.
When I was in a new carreer break early 2023, I spent a lot of time preparing to try to be elected at the primaries of the greens at the national level for ending in the European Parliament. The Chances were very low and so when I lost that early June, a bit of me was dying, and in a series of circumstances, I also ended the relationship with the mother of my 4 kids. At that time they were 7 to 17, and our communication problem between both of us had reached a point where it wasn’t solvable anymore.
2023 was a very hard year for me. Especially around the turn of 2023 to 2024. My world was falling apart, and for about a month, not much more (also not a job), I had fairly dark thoughts. I could get a job again in 2024 and have been freelancing again since then, although it became very sparse since late 2026.
Chapter 3: A new beginning?
Since 2025, AI has arrived in the game, but also, Apple/Tim Cook has become so much more close to Donald Trump, and I became to realize, it would be good to (at least try) to leave the Apple world. Rest-assured:
- It’s not to come back to Microsoft
- It’s probably not going to be fully for Linux in a month
- I don’t know where it goes…
So while I will keep on teaching Apple Technologies, and proably want to my skills, I will also most probably try to learn the new way of programming, which is with Agents. And sure, Claude is the least problematic, until Mistral becomes better, or we can run things locally (probably with 128 GB of RAM), but the gist of my taughts are that I don’t want to end up like my dad when he was 50 as a car mechanics and was completely overwhelmed because what he was doing since 30+ years had changed. I have been programming computers since over 30 years, and it sure did change, but never in the current scale.
So here’s to a potential new begining, probably with Web Technologies, but possibly also native iOS and Android. Either way, you don’t program in a language nowadays, you program by structuring your thoughts in organized Markdown files combined with Agent Skills. There’s much to learn for me, and if possible, I’d like this to be as European as possible, which — also — means that I’d like to try to leave as much as possible the closed world of semi-open-source Swift.