Six years of not knowing if this would work.

I was 18, in a factory, teaching myself software from whatever I could find.

Wouter van Marrum, seated by a window in a green hoodie and a black cap, looking off to one side.

Just out of school, I found out I was going to be a dad. I went to work instead of on to study.

Five and a half years in an egg processing plant, with every spare hour going into code. A decade later I’m still building, and starting to shape what gets built.

Start at 2011 ↓

The story

How I got here

the jobstaught myself

2011

Why I was there at all

At 18 I found out I was going to be a dad. There was an option where I stayed in school and leaned on family to make it work. I chose to find a job and earn my own money instead.

I stayed five and a half years. Whole eggs went in and came out as powder, yolk and white for other factories. That job was the plan, and the reason for everything after it.

Factory employee, five and a half years

2011 2016

Taught by strangers

No course, no cohort, nobody sitting beside me. I learned from whatever I could find, tried things, broke things, and kept going without knowing whether any of it had a future. A Slack community and a handful of people on Twitter were the closest thing I had to teachers. None of them knew they were doing it.

That community is also how I found my second job in software. Laravel 4.2 landed in 2014 and I've built on it ever since, longer than anyone has paid me to.

Evenings and weekends, no one watching me

2016

In the door, still an outsider

I got the job. Wrote real software that real people used. And spent most of it quietly certain that someone would work out I didn't belong there.

My first two developer jobs

2017

Where it became real

Back-end work with real clients and real deadlines. Test suites, error monitoring, the habit of shipping things that don't fall over. Somewhere in those eighteen months the fraud feeling quietly stopped.

The two lines meet here, six years after the second one started.

Back-end, client work, real deadlines

2019 2023

When people started asking me

Healthcare and non-profit projects, a DTAP pipeline built from scratch, Scrum rolled out across an org. Then a legacy API rewritten from the ground up, past 90% test coverage. Somewhere in there the questions started coming to me, from interns and from colleagues.

That turned out to be the part I love most.

Healthcare and non-profit, then a data platform

2024 now

From building it to deciding it

An RFM system that segments customers and feeds our CDP, plus a real-time hub that brings our support channels together. Then a step sideways into product ownership, interim, PSPO I in hand. I don't write the production code at work anymore. I decide what's worth building.

I've done it long enough to like it, not long enough to claim it.

Back-end, then interim product owner

I went into software because I had a family to feed. Loving it came later, and it stuck.

Wouter

Off the clock

Still building, for me

All three turned out to be about time. I noticed that later than I should have.

Live

Now

Where I’ve got to

Interim product owner

Engineer by trade, product owner by curiosity. I’ve stepped away from the keyboard at work to focus on the product. I’m most useful in the gap between what’s technically right and what’s actually worth doing. Whether it’s where I stay, I genuinely don’t know yet. You have to do a thing for a long time before you can say anything true about it.

Helping others find the way in

I dig into AI, sharpen my React, and give back through the Torc.dev community, a good place for people finding their own route into tech, the way I once did.

Took the long way. Glad I did.

No pitch and no funnel. This page exists so you know who I am. If any of it landed, the door’s open.

Say hi ↗