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About me

Very long ago

My name is Maarten De Block and I live in Oostkamp (near Bruges in Belgium). As long as I can remember I've been working or playing with computers. My first computer was a Phillips with an orange screen. Later it was a Commodore 386 followed by an IBM 486. After that I started ordering parts myself and assemble the computers. At that time, I was the only one in my class who had a computer and could work with it.

Long ago

In high school my intrest in computers kept growing. I started repairing and assembling computers for friends and family. My passion for webdevelopment also started then. It took a long time before we had Internet at home. I had 4 siblings and my father feared high telephone bills from dial in connectinos. As soon as broadband was available in our region we got connected.

Less long ago

After high school I started my own company called 'apolloweb'. The intntion was to build sites, but there was a lot more demand for cheap computer repair. This was hard to combine with my studies 'Information managment and support'. My brother Jeroen started helping out and succesfully build the company to what is now Yuniit Solutions.

After my studies I quit the compony to concentrate on my new job.

Not so lopng ago

After my studies I started working as a Business Intelligence Consultant at Dolmen (now RealDomen) close to Brussel. The daily commute (2 hours each way) was very heavy and after a few years I started looking to work closer to home. I found a job in the same position at IBS near Ghent. But after 6 months the Sweden headquarters decided to stop offering BI worldwide.

The call to webdevelopment stayed (by this time a started maartendeblock.be after my hours) and I started looking for a job in webdevelopment. After a short stop at Media Screen Systems I ended up at Coworks. Here I learned all about Drupal.

Now

Since 2010 I'm a full-time freelancer. My focus is one training (Drupal, PHP, CSS, ...) en Freelance jobs. I also started a company that builds sites for small businesses.

Future

Nobody knows what the future will bring, but I will keep working as a Freelancer for large projects and keep running my company to build small sites.