About

I'm a product engineer with frontend and interaction design at the core. I build data- and map-heavy products from idea to production, and I use AI-native workflows to cover ground that used to take a small team.

I spent my student years on two things: studying geodesy, and painting graffiti. Coordinate systems, deep math and projections in the daytime, typography, composition and colour at night, with a few exhibitions in the Netherlands and Thailand. Nowadays, I combine the skills I picked up to turn complex data into visually appealing and easy-to-understand (geospatial) data visualisations and interfaces.

The intersection between engineering and design is what drew me towards web development in 2008. First Flash, then accessible and semantic HTML & CSS, later Canvas & WebGL. I got into creative coding: shaders, motion, event loops, digital experience websites, interactive installations, web-based games. The maths behind making something feel right rather than merely be correct. I have never minded a mathematical rabbit hole if that's what the feature needed.

Those skills transfer straight into data visualisation and WebGIS. I'd been working in both for years, in pieces, and Restor is where they converged all at once: design, spatial data, shaders, performance, SVG, motion, accessibility, in one product that was about something. It's the world's largest network of restoration and conservation sites: 355,000+ sites, 7,900+ organisations, 38,000+ users. I was the sole architect of its geospatial and data visualisation frontend for almost four years, which meant thirty-one map-based data layers, GLSL shader overlays with live value inspection, a polygon drawer that stays smooth at 20,000 vertices, and a force-directed organisation graph with the layout maths pushed into a web worker to keep the frame rate up. Eleven chart primitives in visx that compose into 100+ charts, each wired to its own domain endpoint and documented in Storybook. The map’s data layer load times went from minutes (from v1, built by Google Creative Lab) to seconds. The platform was an Earthshot Prize finalist and won a Gold Anthem Award.

I still work at the visually ambitious end of frontend: Three.js and React Three Fiber, GLSL, motion. Recently I was brought in to finish a navigable 3D-render of Los Angeles for a digital billboard network, and shipped the last phase of it, down to direction-aware spatial audio in 3D space. I'm a developer with a keen eye for design, which in practice means I'll tell you when a layout won't survive real data, and I'll fix the spacing without being asked.

Fahsai is my current personal project: a map of Thailand's burning season that puts fires, wind and PM2.5 in one place, with an AI explanation of what's most likely behind any station's reading. I built it solo, from the ingestion pipelines and backend to the map and the design. It's also where I worked out an AI-augmented workflow that keeps Claude Code's output consistent and reviewable. The case study has the details.

Alongside that I work part-time as AI implementation partner for Aster, a Dutch policy consultancy. I set up their Claude workspace with shared context per organisation, project and consultant, wrote the Agent Skills their consultants use for work like Dutch legal citation checks and monthly reporting, and built a remote MCP server for their hours data, with its own OAuth flow. Next on the list is a policy monitor: each month it will collect legislation and news per domain from multiple sources, have agents check every item for correctness and relevance, and turn the result into a newsletter.

I work best with a lot of rope. The last four years have all been distributed: Restor from the Netherlands for a Zurich team, a London agency before that. Give me the problem and the constraints and I'll come back with questions first, then with something that works. I am happy to work solo, as well as in larger agile product teams.

Frontend and interaction design are where I'm strongest. I also handle the backend a product needs: the data model, the API that feeds the map, the ingestion jobs, the deployment. The far ends of the spectrum are someone else's job, though. I'm not going to design your brand identity, and I'm not going to architect your event-streaming backbone. I am going deeper on the infra side: I'm taking Fahsai from prototype to production, with CI, migrations, tests, containers and cloud staging.

I'm based in Utrecht and work remote, async by preference. I'm looking for my next product engineering role on a data- or map-heavy product: freelance, contract or employed. dev@joostkiens.com