About me

Hi, I'm Lars Lockefeer, a Software Engineer living in Amsterdam. Welcome to my home on the web, where I share links to content that I find interesting and occasionally post notes and thoughts. Feel free to read along!

Like many developers, I have been involved with programming ever since I was a kid. Things got really interesting when I learned to build websites. Having learned this new skill, I naturally applied it to each high-school paper I was asked to hand in, by building a websites instead of handing in a boring paper report.

Soon I learned of this thing called PHP that allowed me to build more advanced things such as guestbooks. I applied these techniques to build the website for our school together with a classmate. A homegrown CMS allowed teachers to publish whichever information they wanted to share with their pupils while the pupils themselves could discuss life, the universe and everything on a tailor-made forum. To top it all off, we created a direct messaging feature that allowed everyone to send cryptic messages to their secret crush. It being the early 2000s, there was a need for this kind of local community as there was no such thing as Facebook or Hyves yet.

After high-school I tried very hard not to become a nerd by signing up for the BA curriculum. I quickly realised, however, that the world of boardrooms and powerpoint was not for me and turned to Computer Science instead. Working a parttime job in web development on the side, I was immediately blown away when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and started doing mobile pet projects.

After having finished an MSc in theoretical computer science in 2013, I decided that instead of building boring enterprise systems, I wanted to dedicate my life to building software that users love to use and applied for a position at an iOS development agency. Starting out as a junior developer, I quickly grew into the role of tech lead.

I was then approached to join a starting organisation with high ambitions as employee number 7 and decided to jump ship. Over the past three years, this organisation has grown to become Picnic whereas I have grown into the role of Mobile Tech Lead, overseeing the development of our apps and the backend systems they connect to.

More recently, I have been starting to contribute back to the community that I have learned so much from at conferences and meetups; by sharing stories and lessons we learn while building the future of grocery shopping.

On this website, you'll find stories as well as links to interesting things that I stumbled upon during my own explorations of the World Wide Web. If you found something here that helped you, don't forget to reach out on Twitter.