Goodry Gubbels
About MeAbout Me
From the Southern Netherlands to the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
I'm Goodry, life and work has carried me from the hills in the Southern Netherlands to the South of Paris, where I've found my spot with my family for now. If I have my say, we'll wind up near the sea even further South still.
For almost thirty years, I've worked at the intersection of technology and people. My career has been spent building the infrastructure, platforms, and teams that help large organisations function effectively, while also shaping the ways of working that help the people inside them thrive.
I started at the very beginning of the internet boom, working for an ISP when "the Internet" was still something most people had never heard of. Since then, I've had the opportunity to work through several waves of technological change. One of the projects I'm still particularly proud of was building a large-scale speech-driven self-service platform. I conceived the original idea, designed the technical architecture, and for many years was the developer responsible for turning it into a working product. It brought together speech recognition, automation, and some of the artificial intelligence techniques and tools that were available at the time, well before such technologies became part of everyday conversation. Today, I'm with JLL, responsible for IT operations across France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
The short version? I enjoy solving problems that sit somewhere between technology and human nature. The technical challenges are interesting, but it's the combination of systems, processes, and people that has kept me engaged throughout my career.
Somewhere along the way, I also spent time studying computer science in Delft and artificial intelligence in Amsterdam. In truth, projects, deadlines, and real-world work often competed successfully with lecture halls, but the curiosity never went away.
That curiosity eventually became part of my profession. A few years later, I found myself leading the development of speech-driven customer platforms and, for quite a while, building them as the sole developer. Looking back, it was a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of language, technology, and user experience, and one that still shapes how I think about technology today.
I've always been less interested in technology for its own sake than in what it enables people to do. Whether the challenge involves infrastructure, operations, automation, organisational change, or emerging technologies, I'm most at home when the answer requires understanding both the system and the humans using it.
Alongside all of that, music has been the constant thread running through my life. Growing up in the Netherlands, I played trumpet in bands and orchestras, and for many years it occupied just as much mental space as technology did.
These days, family and work understandably take priority, and opportunities to play are a little less frequent. Still, every now and then the trumpet comes out of its case, and it doesn't take long to remember why I loved it in the first place.
If you'd like the professional details, you'll find the full story on the Work & CV page. For a shorter overview of my background and areas of expertise, visit Expertise. And if you're simply looking for the formal version, my CV is only a click away.