About
I'm Arden, a front-end engineer from Amsterdam, living in Lisbon since 2017.
I've been building for the web since 2008, the first decade or so freelance and in Amsterdam agencies, everything from full-stack sites to front-end tooling.
Since moving to Portugal I've worked across the range: agency work at East Atlantic Engineering, then product teams at Mercedes-Benz.io, Plum Guide, and now the Publicis Groupe. Consumer marketplaces, automotive platforms, media-planning tools, mostly React and TypeScript, usually the complex, data-heavy kind, and often the design-system layer underneath. At this point the work is as much architecture, setting the bar for front-end quality, and mentoring other developers as it is writing components myself. I came at this from the creative side rather than computer science, which is probably why I care as much about how a thing feels to use as how it's built underneath.
Away from client work I'm a tinkerer. I run a homelab, self-host most of the tools I depend on, including a fitness-tracking stack and a set of MCP servers I use to tal to my own data. I like owning what I rely on and understanding how it works.
When I'm not at a keyboard I'm usually behind a camera, out running, or exploring. My photography lives over at Instagram.
If you're after the formal CV, that's on LinkedIn. If you'd rather see how I think, the writing's a better place to start.