About

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 50 years old and happily married to Karin, proud father of my three kids: my son Roan, and two daughters called 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’m working on, together with my co-founder Barry Kooij, that aims to become 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.

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 know 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 WC 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 speak me at your event, please contact me here.

Lifting

For the last five years I’ve been going to Age’s Krachthonk, a strongman gym where I try to live out my goal of becoming stronger while lifting weird heavy objects. If you’d like to learn more about that, go and follow me on Instagram as I share most of it there. Lifting and walking with a 300kg / 662lbs frame for 15 meter is currently the feat I’m most proud of.