About

Engineer, architect, and CTO.

I'm a CTO and software engineer with more than fifteen years building production systems — and the last several leading them. I've taken products from the first commit to millions of users, grown engineering teams to dozens and an organisation to fifty-plus, and shipped across document automation, blockchain, and live video. I still write the code and design the architecture; I just also hire the people, set the standards, and own the budget now.

BasedTaipei · working across Europe & AsiaHoursTaipei time · available EU hoursLanguagesDutch · English · MandarinAvailabilityOpen to select projects
Roy van Kaathoven — portrait
Path

Fifteen years, end to end

Wellness platform logo
2026 – now

Wellness platform

Founding Engineer

Running a tiny, AI-first team building a creator platform from scratch — subscription channels, structured courses, and live streaming with both free and ticketed sessions. By leaning hard on AI in the development loop, a handful of us have shipped quickly: full-stack platform, Stripe billing with creator revenue splits, and a branded channel that funnels audiences to individual creators.

Hummingbird Studio logo
2024 – now

Hummingbird Studio

Frontend & infrastructure consultant

Frontend architecture (React / Next.js) and infrastructure for a creative studio in the Chinese market — standing up and running servers on Tencent Cloud and AWS China for regional compliance and performance, plus backend optimisation to cut latency.

Live-streaming platform logo
2019 – 2025

Live-streaming platform

Co-founder & CTO

I co-founded an interactive consumer live-streaming platform and wrote its first line of code. As CTO I owned all of technology — architecture, infrastructure, security, and a multi-million-dollar budget — growing the company to around fifty people with an engineering team of about twelve at its core, first in China, then Taiwan, settling in the Netherlands in 2023. We scaled it to a global audience on a multi-region AWS stack (ECS, WebRTC, Cloudflare), through to an acquisition in 2024.

Case study ↗
Laixing Network Technology logo
2018 – 2024

Laixing Network Technology

CTO · blockchain

Led technology for a blockchain company — a team of around twenty-five building decentralized applications. We launched a decentralized exchange on the TRON blockchain that ranked #1 across all chains several times, and GuildChat, a social mobile app for chatting, sending crypto, and playing on-chain games.

Quadira logo
2013 – 2018

Quadira

Software developer → technical team lead

Hired as the company's first software developer to build a Document Output Management platform, Advanced-Forms, to replace expensive enterprise software. I built the workflow engine and document converters from scratch (my first C# work), and after we hit product-market fit, grew and led a team of around twelve as technical team lead.

Case study ↗
KJ Business Software logo
2009 – 2013

KJ Business Software

Software developer

My first job out of school: building custom business software — webshops, ERP, CRM, order management — across automotive, catering, manufacturing, and non-profits.

How I work

A few things I believe

Boring technology, ambitious outcomes

Known failure modes and deep documentation beat novelty. I reach for a small, reliable default stack and spend my judgement on the actual product.

Own it end to end

Backend, frontend, and the infrastructure underneath — plus the team and the culture. The system and the organisation are two views of the same thing.

Ship the simple thing

Plain language, visible progress, and a bias toward shipping something that works over being clever.

Tech radar

What I reach for

The tech behind the projects I'm running right now, ranked by how readily I reach for it — from Adopt (my default) out to Hold (steering away). Hover a blip for the why; click a quadrant or ring to filter.

recently added established

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Now

What I’m building

Right now I'm leading engineering at a creator wellness platform, building it from scratch with a tiny, AI-first team. Alongside it I take select freelance and fractional-CTO work — on Taipei time, with my availability kept open during European hours — and build small, sharp developer tools in the open under Arjia Labs: a local-first issue tracker for AI agents, a library for prompts and skills, and a one-filesystem-over-everything CLI.