# 12.5 years at Wux 2 November 2026 · \[note\] · 4 min read A look back at my first 12.5 years at Wux, and on to the next. [\#wux](/en/blog?tag=wux) · [\#career](/en/blog?tag=career) In 2013 I was turned down for an internship at Wux. Bo was looking for one back-end developer and one front-end developer, and picked the two who had applied for both roles. Not long after that, Bo wanted an Android app built in Java. I happened to know Java already, from writing plugins for my Minecraft servers. Just before the holidays, I got a place after all. On 1 May 2014 I officially joined as an employee. That was 12.5 years ago. ## A book about GameMaker Around the age of thirteen, I ordered a book by Mark Overmars, the creator of GameMaker, online. That is how I started programming. It was the first time I realised you could use code to make things that had not existed before. ## Learning from Minecraft In my third year of secondary school, I bought Minecraft. Not much later I was running servers with entirely custom Java plugins, with several servers connected as one network. At its peak we often had all 120 slots filled, with a queue waiting to get in. We worked with several big YouTubers. A Mojang developer even dropped by once, with an upside-down character. Nobody called it that, but it was my first education in server administration. You learn about performance when a hundred and twenty people all do something you had not anticipated. And you learn that players will be in your chat within a minute if something goes down. That part has never really changed. Minecraft got me working with Java. At college, PHP, SQL and JavaScript joined the mix, and that is where I fell in love with PHP. No compiler to deal with: save, refresh, and see it live straight away. ## The early days at Wux Around August 2013 I started working on that Android app. Wux was still small back then: two people besides Bo, plus five interns. Since then Wux has trained more than 100 interns, and a large part of the team started out that way too. It did not stop at one internship. There were three, and on 1 May 2014 I became an employee. From then on I worked alongside school: during the holidays and sometimes on Fridays. Bo taught me a lot about programming, but funnily enough even more about everything around it, like running a business. In 2014 he was the one who suggested I register a company with two classmates. ## Dysewebs and a League of Legends quiz That became Dysewebs, my first company. We built websites for clients, but also plenty of things nobody had asked for. Like LeagueQuiz: a quiz about League of Legends champions. You had to guess skins, match pictures of abilities to the right champion and recognise champions by their voices. It even had a ranked mode, complete with rankings. We also had a fair stack of projects that never made it. Looking back, those may have taught me the most. ## Duxa and Minecraft hosting Dysewebs was really the predecessor to Duxa. In 2015 the same two friends and I started Duxa, now joined by Yannick. That included Koopjeserver, a Minecraft hosting service. The hobby from a few years earlier became a business, except now I was running servers for other people's players. I set up the technology. Yannick got our name out there, ran the ads, did front-end work and even put together a support team of students. Duxa and Wux came together in 2020 and 2021. When Niels joined in 2022, we grew into a much more mature company. I am now a co-owner. ## Not just back-end Looking back, I never really chose one thing. Games, Java plugins, servers, hosting, websites, quizzes, applications, Laravel and our own packages. That is still the case today. A large part of my time now goes into AI. I work out which techniques actually work and how we can use them better. Not just for Wux, but for all of [Adventure Media Groep](https://adventure.nl), which Wux is part of. I now write most of my own code together with AI too. I also still look after Wux's servers. It is essentially the same lesson as with those Minecraft servers, except now it is clients in the chat instead of players. That server work led to Kespy, our own server management panel. [More on Kespy in my projects](/en/projects#kespy). And I spend more and more time passing on knowledge, so the things I have figured out over the years do not stay in my head alone. AI makes the specialist work a lot faster. What remains is keeping track of how everything fits together, from server to code and from client to incident. That is still the part I enjoy most. ## The team The best part is still the team. When something goes wrong, everyone helps think it through. That is why I still enjoy coming in after 12.5 years. In 2013 there was room for one back-end developer and one front-end developer. I never became a front-end developer. But back-end alone no longer quite covers it either. Here's to the next 12.5. [Newer: From software developers to software architects](/en/blog/from-developers-to-architects) · [All posts](/en/blog) · [RSS feed](/en/feed.xml)