About Jaap Stronks
I'm Jaap Stronks, a digital strategist and engineer based in Rotterdam. I work at the intersection of technology, communications and organisational strategy, and the through-line in everything below is reclaiming technology as a progressive force.
My day job is at CIIIC, the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition, a Dutch Nationaal Groeifonds programme building up the immersive experience sector. I lead its digital infrastructure: the website, which I rebuilt from scratch on Payload and Astro in 2026, the applications the programme runs on, and the AI tooling that makes a sprawling coalition navigable to the people working inside it.
Alongside that I run three things of my own. Deckyard is an open-source, self-hosted presentation platform with a full Model Context Protocol interface, so agents and humans drive the same system. Dreamkit is a complete website platform for progressive organisations, hosted in Europe, with petitions, donations, newsletters and analytics built in. WOO Buddy, which I build with Jeroen Hammer, helps Dutch civil servants redact freedom-of-information documents without uploading them anywhere and without a language model in the loop.
The full list is here, including what came before.
How I got here
I spent over a decade building digital strategies and platforms for not-for-profit organisations, campaigns and cultural institutions, including work for FNV, GroenLinks, Milieudefensie, Amnesty International and Nieuwe Instituut. I founded Bureau Bolster in 2014 and built Wings, a website-as-a-service platform that ran campaign sites for a good part of the Dutch progressive sector until it was wound down in 2026 and succeeded by Dreamkit.
Notably, I became a working developer after running an agency rather than before, largely through agentic coding tools and a lot of self-teaching. That order of events shapes how I think about all of this.
What I'm interested in
Mostly what I call agentic engineering: building software with and through AI agents. LLMs are changing how software gets made, and I am curious about what that means specifically for solo builders, small teams, open source and digital sovereignty. When a very small team can build and maintain infrastructure that used to require a company, the economics of self-hosting and open standards change, and a lot of arguments that ended in "but who would maintain it" need reopening.
I'm particularly interested in the tension between the progressive tech community's scepticism of AI and the practical, potentially liberating implications of these tools for open standards, decentralisation and reduced dependency on big tech. I don't think that tension resolves neatly, and I would rather sit in it than pick a side early.