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29 July 2026/2 min read

From the factory floor to the cloud — what industrial automation taught me about software

Before I built software, I programmed PLCs. The biggest difference? In a factory a bug doesn't cost a retry — it costs material.

#personal#automation#industry#vision

I learned to program on a PLC in a factory hall, not on a MacBook in a startup.

At Ranpak I programmed Beckhoff controls for industrial machines. No hot reload, no console.log, no "we'll fix it in production". When a PLC made a mistake, a 200-kilo arm moved the wrong way.

That difference — between a bug that costs a retry and a bug that costs material — still shapes how I write code every day.

What I learned on the factory floor

Before Ranpak, I worked at Nedcar and O-I Manufacturing. No code, but the best lesson I ever got: if a process doesn't work, it's the system, not the people.

On the factory floor you see exactly where it rubs. People inventing workarounds because software gets in the way. Processes that exist "because we've always done it this way". Expensive machines standing idle because nobody has time to operate them.

When I later got a €100k cutting machine running again at Boogaard Textiles — not by tinkering with the machine, but by building the software around it — that was exactly what I'd learned on the factory floor: look at the process, not at the problem.

The bridge to the cloud

At Agron I learned the enterprise side: data quality at scale. A BI dashboard that detected 30,000+ errors in existing ERP data. Again: not broken software, just a process that had never been set up properly.

Now I build full-stack web platforms, AI-driven tools, and API integrations. The technology is different, but the approach is the same:

  1. Understand how the work really flows — not how it looks on paper
  2. Find the friction — where are people inventing workarounds?
  3. Remove that friction — with the simplest possible solution

Not every developer can program a PLC. But every developer should understand what happens when their code hits the real world.

What it delivers

That combination is exactly what makes Kerris ICT unique. I know how a factory works and how an API works. I understand why an expensive machine stands idle — and I can fix it with a Laravel API and a dashboard.

Most developers build features. I find broken processes and fix them.