I grew up close to Brussel, Belgium, and actually started my career as a watchmaker. Even though I was always busy working with computers as a kid, it never really crossed my mind to do something with it in my professional life. Watchmaking, in a way, is a lot like programming – you need to understand the system to ensure it works as designed. After working for various luxury brands abroad, I came back to Belgium for the love of my life, and it soon became apparent I couldn't move forward in my aspirations as a professional watchmaker. Moving back to my original passion, I started attending school again to become a programmer. My initial dream was to become an Android developer, but after a few months of C#, I ventured into Windows Phone (huge promises at the time). That basically skyrocketed my career as I was making apps on the side getting noticed in the ecosystem. This moved me from operations engineer to app developer to team lead to development lead all the way to CTO (which is what I'm doing now at TrendMiner) by embracing a passion for software development.