Daan Hoekstra

Backend and AI engineer. Spent 15 years as a product designer and five of them at VALK, where I worked across fintech infrastructure serving 70+ banks. Now I build AI agents and open-source tools, mostly focused on the gap between what LLM documentation promises and what actually holds up in production. I write about backend architecture, AI engineering patterns, and what it takes to build systems that survive contact with real financial data. Most of what I publish comes from things that broke, surprised me, or took longer than they should have.