Senior Android developer from Belgium, fourteen years in, running my own one-person studio, DroidBender, since 2013. From a national digital identity app to a theme park in your pocket. If the team is good and the product matters, I'm in.
I've been building Android apps since the Eclipse days, and I still like it for the same simple reason: you make something, hand your phone to someone, and watch them use it.
I run solo through my own company, DroidBender, and I've spent most of fourteen years as the senior Android profile dropped into a client's team. Big enterprise rollouts, two-person sprints, a national identity app, a kids' drawing game. The range is wide, but the thread is the same. I care about the part the user actually touches, and I'd rather get the small things right than win an architecture argument.
I'm easy to work with, hard to bore, and I'll tell you straight when I think an idea is going to cost six months for nothing.
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1 screenshotitsme is Belgium's digital identity app, used by close to 8 million people to log in, confirm payments and sign documents at more than a thousand banks, insurers and public services, with no card reader and no passwords. An itsme e-signature carries the same legal weight as a handwritten one, so on the Android side the bar for security, stability and accessibility is about as high as it gets. Every feature clears review before it ships, and a slip has real consequences.
View details and screenshotsA full-time interim Android lead role at ONWARD Medical, a company building therapies for people with spinal cord injury, from non-invasive spinal cord stimulation to brain-spine interfaces. The work itself is under NDA, so the details stay off the page, but it was a senior, hands-on lead role in a serious medical-device setting near Eindhoven.
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1 screenshotTelenet's TV app and the successor to Yelo Play, the one that let people ditch the set-top box: live TV, replays and on-demand, wherever you are. Built natively for iOS and Android first, with an Apple TV version later, on a deliberately dynamic frontend so Telenet could keep building on the same foundation. I led the Android side, embedded in-house with their design and backend teams, and a lot of the job was keeping that structure scalable rather than painted into a corner.
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6 screenshotsThe official app for Philips Hue smart lighting: group your bulbs into rooms and zones, control them from anywhere, set the mood from a designer-made scene gallery, automate them around your day and sync them to your TV, music or games. I came in for the big 2017 redesign as the senior profile in a team of eight and led the new architecture, how the app talks to the Hue Bridge, how it tracks room and scene state, and how new features slot in without tearing up the foundation. It is now well past 10 million downloads.
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4 screenshotsPart of my Ketnet work for VRT was the Ketnet Junior app, a safe, ad-free playground where toddlers watch their favourite shows and play educational games with characters like Kaatje and Bumba. My piece was the drawing and colouring side: turning raw touch input into a smooth, non-laggy drawing tool a small child could actually use, even on a cheap tablet. Getting the line to just follow a finger took a lot of tuning, and it was the spicy, satisfying kind of problem.
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2 screenshotsBuilt the Android app for Dutch broadcaster BNN/VARA on top of the Zender-platform, which lets publishers and broadcasters publish interactive video to their own mobile channels and out to Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. The app put daily videos, polls, quizzes and small games in your pocket.
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5 screenshotsThe companion app for Blokken, the long-running VRT quiz show. You played the show's 8-letter-word game from your phone in three modes: play along with the next day's episode for a shot at a prize, duel friends or strangers, or go solo and chase a streak. Every right answer unlocked a letter, and it all came down to finding the word first.
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4 screenshotsThe official Efteling app, your companion for a day at the Dutch theme park: live wait times, show schedules, the park map, the nearest toilets and how tall you need to be for Baron 1898. I built the first version in a team of two, in about two months, against a hard deadline and Efteling's high bar for feel. It is still going, now past a million downloads and around 4.7 stars.
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8 screenshotsA clinically validated app, developed with cardiologists, that checks your heart rhythm from a 60-second fingertip measurement on your phone camera and gives an immediate result and advice. It uses PPG signal processing to spot irregularities like atrial fibrillation, the kind of thing that can quietly lead to a stroke. I worked on the Android side, where medical-grade requirements and tight, real-time signal constraints left very little room for sloppiness.
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7 screenshotsThe app for Mobile Vikings, the Belgian mobile operator: check your data, minutes and texts in real time, top up your SIM, renew or switch plans, and grab deals, all without paperwork. I worked on the consumer app during my time there, including the VoIP integration that let people place calls over data. Proper mass-market telecom work with a big, real user base.
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6 screenshotsBringme puts reception and delivery into one app: a clear view of your Bringme Box with every parcel, pickup and loanable item, who is visiting, and a notification the moment a delivery lands. For offices it also shows who is in, at home or away. I built the Android side, the app half of the smart-locker hardware that runs deliveries, mail and visitors for offices and apartment buildings.
View details and screenshotsWorked on what became the Renault R-Link in-car system. Android in an automotive context: tight platform constraints, custom hardware, and a very different idea of what a screen is for.
View details and screenshotsI write the tests first. It forces me to be clear about what a feature should do before I build it, and it means I can change things later without crossing my fingers. Most of what I ship has tests sitting under it.
I would rather write code that is easy to follow than code that shows off. On freelance work someone else takes it over when I leave, so it has to make sense without me in the room to explain it.
I work best inside the team, not off to one side. I will pair on a bug late before a release, and I will also speak up when something looks like a lot of effort for little return.
I care most about the part people actually use. I try to look at it from the user's side, and keep product, design and backend in the same conversation, so what ships is what everyone actually meant to build.
A few notes from people I've worked with, via LinkedIn.
I worked with Martijn at Telenet on several projects. Martijn is a person full of energy, which he controls in a very nice way. Most of the time he energizes the team with fun and pleasure, but at the right times he is very professional and able to commit himself to solving problems. He has thorough knowledge of Android development and embraces new system aspects in a short time, sharing it vividly with his team, where he takes the role of lead developer. Beside all those technological skills, he showed some entrepreneurship, which is the icing on a great IT professional.
We worked together as technical leads on the Yugo TV applications at Telenet. Martijn is one of those colleagues that make your working life a lot more fun. He is always happy and cheerful, and when a deadline approaches he makes very pragmatic decisions to get the best result possible. Next to his people skills there is also his technical side: when architectural decisions had to be made, Martijn always found a solution to tackle the problem. It was not always easy to integrate the given designs, but in the end Martijn did a great job creating an app that fits the needs of the customer.
I worked with Martijn on a project at Efteling. We created the Android version of the Efteling app in less than two months. It was one of those projects where you work close together, churn out a lot of code, stay on the same page, have productive discussions, and finish a great app in time. If I had to hire an Android programmer, he would be my first choice.
