About me
Hi, I’m Tim. I'm a mathematician who builds software.
More specifically: I did a PhD in probability theory and spent several years as an assistant professor at TU Eindhoven, working on mathematical systems where the average behaviour tells you almost nothing about what's actually going on, and where the interesting things happen at the edges and the worst cases. In 2020, on the day the country went in lockdown for COVID-19, I left academia for applied work. I haven't looked back.
Since then I've worked in and around the places where data, AI, and public life intersect. I led a data science team at the Ministry of Justice; consulted for government agencies on AI and data strategy; and was lead data scientist and tech lead at a healthcare AI company in Eindhoven, where we built tools for long-term care.
What threads all of that together, for me, is a particular way of seeing software systems. Most of the interesting problems I've encountered aren't really technical problems — they're complexity problems dressed up as technical ones. Systems that grew one optimisation at a time until nobody could describe what they did anymore. Codebases where the cost of a feature was distributed invisibly across everyone who had to live with it. Public processes where each individual reform made sense and the aggregate was a mess.
This is where I think my old training actually pays off. A probabilist learns early that local intuition is a poor guide to global behaviour, and that systems optimised for average performance often have terrible worst cases. That's exactly the diagnosis I'd give much of the software that now underpins public life.
So this site is where I write about that. About complexity and how it accumulates. About the tools we have for containing it. About the difference between software that works on average and software that works for the people who need it. And occasionally about whatever else I can't stop thinking about.
I live in Nuenen, the village of Vincent van Gogh and Edsger Dijkstra.