Welcome to my personal blog. I’m Coen ten Thije Boonkkamp, and this is my digital playground where I share all things law, code, startups, wins—and yes, even failures.
As a law student, I launched a legal tech startup, quickly realizing that living inside Microsoft Word forever wasn’t exactly my dream. But reality hit hard—I went broke and spent two humbling months on social welfare. Eventually, I landed a job at the leading Dutch trust office at the time—a challenging experience, to say the least. Let’s just say: not exactly birthday-party anecdotes.
Undeterred, I dove back into startups, this time supported by UtrechtInc. The community was fantastic and provided solid entrepreneurial lessons. Could I have made more of it? Probably. But then COVID struck, flipping my startup upside down and pushing me once again toward bankruptcy.
I pressed reset and returned to law. Joining Liance was a game changer—I found myself thriving, advising innovative life sciences projects, and significantly leveling up professionally. It was exactly the platform I needed. Today, I’m independent again, advising fascinating initiatives like the 100+ Study at Amsterdam UMC, the Alzheimer Genetics Hub, and the DEMENTREE Biobank.
Tip Still offering well-reviewed legal advice to select life science projects. Working on something interesting? Let’s chat.
Oh, and programming. Can’t forget that. I stumbled upon Swift early on and discovered its power for writing clear legal business logic. Following classic startup advice—“build and launch quickly”—I created a legal tech app, only to learn an inconvenient truth: no one wants legal tech on mobile. Seriously, no one.
Pivoting to the web was the logical next step, but here’s the catch—I stubbornly insisted on writing the site in Swift. Let’s just say, building an elegant website purely in Swift is a challenge. Did I mention I value elegance in code? To me, writing elegant code is akin to crafting art, and trust me, elegant code is not easily achieved.
Thankfully, the brilliant folks at PointFree showed me the light. I’ve been a subscriber since 2018, and their content is nothing short of phenomenal. Their functional programming approach is undeniably superior—clean, maintainable, elegant. But outside their open-source website, real-world examples of Swift-driven sites were scarce.
Developing a website with Swift is exhilarating, clean, yet incredibly challenging. Drawing inspiration from PointFree’s functional elegance, I set out to build coenttb.com using Swift and Vapor. The journey was profoundly rewarding, yet peppered with headaches. Front-end dynamics? Definitely still a work in progress (any Swift WASM experts around? Let’s connect!). Writing maintainable, elegant code? Surprisingly tough when swimming against the tide of HTML/CSS/JS conventions.
So, I’m open-sourcing coenttb.com.
Why open source? Starting from scratch is overrated, and if I can spare others the headaches I faced, it’s worth it. Whether you’re passionate about Swift or just curious about web development in Swift, this is your invitation.
My goals are simple:
Demonstrate elegant structuring of a Swift Vapor site.
Save you from tedious trial-and-error.
Collect your invaluable feedback to improve continuously.
Swift for web development isn’t the easy route, but it’s undeniably rewarding when done right. Join me—explore, learn, fork, contribute. Let’s make something elegant together.
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