My name is John. I’ve been telling computers what to do for 20+ years. I currently live in Rotterdam, Netherlands with my wife and two kids. I enjoy playing tennis, disc golf, and just about any other sport. I also love video games which was my main entry into programming/technology.
Motivation behind Gametje
I first came up with the idea in 2015, shortly after moving to the Netherlands. I was playing some Jackbox games with some friends from my tennis club on a Friday evening and we were having a great time. As you probably know, the Dutch are phenomenal in English but being witty can be challenging when it’s not in your native tongue. They all expressed interest in playing the games in Dutch but there was not any option at the time. They wanted to play it with their parents who were not quite as strong in English and share the joy and laughter. As a programmer, I thought, “Could that be so hard?”
I started working on a prototype written in NodeJS in 2017 as a side project but that was mostly to learn the language. It turned out alright. It was playable and decently fun but I found UX design was just as hard as I thought it would be. That project and my spare time eventually fizzled out when I took a new job in January 2018 and welcomed my daughter to the world. A few jobs and years later and I started working part-time at my “regular” job and that gave me 1.5-2 dedicated days a week to work on this new project. I wrote my first line of Gametje code in January 2023.