Hi there, my name is Remkus de Vries. Well, it’s actually Joeke-Remkus, but given how most of you will pronounce the J as dzy … I decided to drop my first name. Online that is.
I’m 51 years old and happily married to Karin, proud father of my three kids: my son Roan, and my daughters Marinde and Sterre.
I live in the province of Fryslân, the Netherlands–which will explain my Frisian first names. And I guess my last name too !
Every day
I love making sites fast. I do this by running a premier WordPress agency called Truer than North. Our main focus is performance & scalability, for e-commerce & publishing WordPress sites. We build fast, secure, and scalable solutions in with WordPress, custom themes, and custom plugins. All in the pursuit of website speed, and scalability.
Scanfully
Scanfully is a startup I’ve launched together with Barry Kooij. Scanfully is the Performance & Site Health monitoring service for WordPress. One dashboard for your WordPress sites’ Performance and Health. Your Scanfully Dashboard consolidates all your WordPress sites, sending you timely alerts for required changes.
We are currently monitoring for uptime, SSL certificates, performance, Site Health data changes, and we log all of WordPress’ activity in a log (off server). Check out all of Scanfully’s features.
Within WP
My courses, newsletter and podcast are published under the Within WP brand.
Previously, I have worked at:
- Servebolt, the fastest WordPress hosting company out there as Head of People & Partners
- Yoast, the #1 WordPress SEO plugin as Manager of Partnerships
WordCamp Founder
I’m probably mostly known as being one of co-founder and (co-)lead for the first two WordCamp Europe conferences. As well as the first half-dozen WordCamp Netherlands.
WordPress much?
Yes, very, very much! Been working with WordPress since early 2005, so I think that qualifies me as a WordPress veteran.
I do a lot of volunteer work in the WordPress community– in any way which way I can. Whether that be organizing WordCamps and WordPress Meetups in attending or speaking at them.
Additionally, I’m also helping out with the Dutch WordPress Polyglots team. On top of that, I’m also the president of the Stichting WP Nederland, and one of the things we do is organize the Dutch WordCamps. And owner of WP Realm.
Not only am I working with this wonderful piece of software every single day in all the various capacities, but I’m also the admin of the Dutch WordPress forums, as well as lead the translations team and make sure the Dutch WordPress version is released in a timely fashion. Fortunately, this is fully automated nowadays.
If you’d like to have me speak me at your event, please contact me here.
Lifting
For the last five years, I’ve been really into Strongman. I’ve got a very decent homegym, but I’m also going to a local strongman gym of a buddy of mine. Long story short, I love lifting heavy objects. If you’d like to learn more about that, go and follow me on Instagram, as I share most of it there.
My frame carry with a 300 kg / 662lbs run for 15 meter is still the feat I’m most proud of.
