History

Hi, I'm Merel!

I wasn't always a web developer, but my passion for building websites has been with me for long.

My journey started very cliché: I remember buying a book called "websites for dummies" and working through it in about 2 weeks, next to my classes in high school (I was doing pre-university secondary education at the time). I made a monstrous website, the way most 90s private websites looked like: a collection of ugly color combinations, links made from plain text and loads and loads of pictures. It took forever to load all those pictures.

I learned from that.

I had chosen Computer Science as one of my optional subjects and noticed I highly enjoyed it.
There were, however, other subjects I liked. Biology, for instance. When the time came when I had to choose a follow up education, I doubted between 3 things: Psychology, Computer Science and Biology. Since I knew I was good at Biology (I knew my grades) and since I thought there was no education on University level for Computer Science (In Dutch, Computer Science is called "Informatics", loosely translated, so I had no idea to look for the words Computer Science! I had been very badly informed. ), I chose to do Biology.

I have now finished my Biology Bachelor degree, and I'm now doing the Master BioInformatics. BioInformatics sounds very abstract, but it basically comes down to making programs that use ridiculously complex algorithms to generate a specific outcome from loads and loads of data points. The field is relatively young. We were the first batch of students to ever study it at the VU. It has been brought to life because in Biology, new techniques and machines make it possible to generate high-throughput data. This entails doing a single test and generating for instance 20,000 data points. It is so much work to make the calculations by hand or via Excel, that the possibility to let a program to do the work for you is highly valued.

In the summer when I first started my Master I had the chance to work at a software company called WoodWing. I had a very good time there, and I enjoyed the work very much. A year later my contract ended and I decided that was the perfect time to set up my own company. And here we are!

There, now that we are up to speed, is there anything I can help you with?
Send an e-mail to merel@karmacom.nl or send me a message on FaceBook or LinkedIn (the icons to the right upper side of the page will help you with that).