2009 – 2013
KJ Business Software
Software developer
My first job out of school: building custom business software — webshops, ERP, CRM, order management — across automotive, catering, manufacturing, and non-profits.
About Roy van Kaathoven, 罗逸. A Dutchman in Taipei.
Engineer, architect, and CTO.
I'm a CTO and software engineer with more than fifteen years building production systems — and the last several leading them. I've taken products from the first commit to more than a million users, grown an engineering team from three to twelve inside a company of fifty, and shipped across document automation, blockchain, and live video. I still write the code and design the architecture; I just also hire the people, set the standards, and own the budget now.
- Based
- Taipei · working across Europe & Asia
- Hours
- Taipei time · available EU hours
- Languages
- Dutch · English · Mandarin
- Availability
- Open to select projects
Path, the Dutch years
Fifteen years, end to end
2013 – 2018
ERP software vendor
Software developer → technical team lead
Hired as the company's first software developer to build a Document Output Management platform to replace expensive enterprise software. I built the workflow engine and document converters from scratch (my first C# work), and after we hit product-market fit, grew and led a team of around twelve as technical team lead.
Case studyHow I work
A few things I believe
Boring technology, ambitious outcomes
Known failure modes and deep documentation beat novelty. I reach for a small, reliable default stack and spend my judgement on the actual product.
Own it end to end
Backend, frontend, and the infrastructure underneath — plus the team and the culture. The system and the organisation are two views of the same thing.
Ship the simple thing
Plain language, visible progress, and a bias toward shipping something that works over being clever.
Delft blue began as a copy.
Dutch potters imitated the Chinese blue-and-white porcelain the VOC shipped home, and kept at it until the copy became a craft. That same century, from 1624 to 1662, the Dutch held a fort on Taiwan.
Now a Dutchman in Taipei trains machines to make art, and they learn the same way. Imitate, repeat, until it's yours.
Shenzhen, 2018 to 2024.
I lived in Shenzhen, the city often called China's Silicon Valley. Delft learned from Chinese porcelain; centuries later I went the other way. I was CTO of a live-streaming platform, and did my learning the way the potters did: copying, getting it wrong, repeating.
The work from those years
2018 – 2024
Laixing Network Technology
CTO · blockchain
Led technology for a blockchain company — a team of around twenty-five building decentralized applications. We launched a decentralized exchange on the TRON blockchain that ranked #1 across all chains several times, and GuildChat, a social mobile app for chatting, sending crypto, and playing on-chain games.
2019 – 2025
Live-streaming platform
Co-founder & CTO
I co-founded an interactive consumer live-streaming platform and wrote its first line of code. As CTO I owned all of technology — architecture, infrastructure, security, and a multi-million-dollar budget — growing the company to around fifty people with an engineering team of about twelve at its core, first in China, then Taiwan, settling in the Netherlands in 2023. We scaled it to a global audience on a multi-region AWS stack (ECS, WebRTC, Cloudflare), through to an acquisition in 2024.
Case study罗逸
罗逸, my name in Chinese. 深圳, Shenzhen. Written in stroke order.
Taiwan, 2024 to now.
This is where I live and work, on Taipei time, with my availability kept open during European hours.
Running today
2024 – now
Hummingbird Studio
Frontend & infrastructure consultant
Frontend architecture (React / Next.js) and infrastructure for a creative studio in the Chinese market — standing up and running servers on Tencent Cloud and AWS China for regional compliance and performance, plus backend optimisation to cut latency.
2026 – now
Wellness platform
Founding Engineer
Running a tiny, AI-first team building a creator platform from scratch — subscription channels, structured courses, and live streaming with both free and ticketed sessions. By leaning hard on AI in the development loop, a handful of us have shipped quickly: full-stack platform, Stripe billing with creator revenue splits, and a branded channel that funnels audiences to individual creators.
2026 – now
Rovak Solutions
Principal
Rovak Solutions is my AI-first software studio — the vehicle for work that is bigger than a single engineer. I specify and own the architecture, and coding agents supply the capacity, which is how a studio this small takes on full product builds, platform work, and rescues of projects that have gone sideways. This site is the engineer; the studio is the firm.
rovak.solutionsNow
What I’m building
Right now I'm leading engineering at a creator wellness platform, building it from scratch with a tiny, AI-first team. Alongside it I take select freelance and fractional-CTO work — on Taipei time, with my availability kept open during European hours — and build small, sharp developer tools in the open under Arjia Labs: a local-first issue tracker for AI agents, a library for prompts and skills, and a one-filesystem-over-everything CLI.
Godspeed (Little Machine)
At night
I make the machine make art.
Software engineer by day, AI creator by night. I direct AI agents to make music videos, pixel worlds and tiny games.