Mels van Vliet

Why this persona fits the audience

Operates the gateway layer for three product squads in Amsterdam on Tyk Cloud. He keeps service owners, cert renewals, and route inventories in Notion, and handles change requests from a shared backlog rather than a dedicated API platform team.

• Age: 34
• Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Occupation: Platform Engineer
• Income: €88k/year
• Education: MSc in Software Engineering
• Company size: 120 employees, post-Series B healthtech startup focusing on electronic health record integrations
• Years in role: 2.5 years (joined as employee #45, now one of three platform engineers)

“‘I didn’t become a platform engineer to be a gatekeeper. I did it so people could stop worrying about this stuff and just build.’”

Mels van Vliet graduated from TU Delft in 2013 and worked at a SRE consultancy for five years before joining what was then a 40-person healthtech startup. His team of three manages APIs for electronic health record integrations, handling everything from cert renewals to route inventories. His current setup relies on Tyk Cloud, but he’s frustrated by its limitations. He’d rather not be the only one handling certs (he’s been woken up twice this month), but his CEO keeps delaying hiring. His Notion dashboards are his lifeline—he color-codes everything, has templates for onboarding, and tracks all service owners (he’s lost count of how many times new hires have ‘forgotten’ to update their squads’ inventories). He’s proud of his system but knows it’s brittle. He avoids linkedin meetings (he’d rather fix things than talk about fixing them), and his idea of a good Friday is ‘no incidents and a clean inbox.’ He cycles everywhere, maintains a small open-source repo for Tyk plugins, and has a ‘this is fine’ relationship with his bike’s slipping gears. He’s saving for a house with a garden (his parents won’t stop asking when he’ll ‘settle down’) and a Pinarello (his indulgences are few but obsessive). He’s quietly frustrated that his company treats the API gateway like a ‘set and forget’ project—and that he’s the only one who sees it that way. But he’s too conscientious to ignore the rot. His goal? ‘Make it so boring that people stop noticing it works.’

Background & daily life

A day in their life

5:58 AM: Alarm. He grinds beans, uses a scale for espresso, and eats overnight oats while reading Hacker News. 6:35 AM: On his bike (he takes the long route along the canals). 8:00 AM: Arrives early, avoids chit-chat, sets up his standing desk. 9:00 AM: Standup. He silently judges anyone who doesn’t have their updates in the shared doc. 10:30 AM: Debugging a cert renewal that expired at 2 AM. 12:00 PM: Lunch at his desk (prepped tofu, rice, and steamed broccoli). 1:30 PM: A product manager asks for a ‘simple’ route change. Mels calculates the blast radius and says ‘I’ll get back to you by EOD.’ 3:00 PM: He reviews a PR and catches a hardcoded endpoint. 4:45 PM: He updates Notion with the routing changes (adding a post-it ‘Remind squad to update their service inventory’). 5:28 PM: He leaves without saying goodbye. 6:00 PM: Cycling home. 6:45 PM: Makes espresso, waters his basil, and watches a tech video. 8:30 PM: Lents lived down with a beer. 10:00 PM: Skims tweets, turns off notifications, reads a book (currently ‘The Phoenix Project’ again, for the third time). 11:00 PM: Asleep.

Lifestyle

Mels lives in a minimalist apartment with IKEA furniture, a standing desk, and too many espresso machines. His routine is rigid: 6 AM wake-up, 30-minute bike to work (with a shower at the office), and a strict 5:30 PM departure. He meal-preps dinners (mostly lentil stews, stir-fries) but splurges on weekends at local kaaskroketten stalls. Health-wise, he’s in decent shape from cycling but skips gyms—“I hate treadmills.” Social life is small: biweekly pub quizzes at Café de Prententent, occasional dinner with his one close friend from university (now a DevOps engineer). His biggest splurge is his bike; he’s saving for a Pinarello. Financially, he tracks every euro in Firefly III (self-hosted). He’s single but doesn’t stress about it—“Falling in love would mess with my sleep schedule.”

Work life

Mels runs the gateway layer for three product teams, handling certs, routing, and onboarding. His day: 9 AM standup, 4 hours of deep work (fixing Tyk misconfigurations, reviewing Terraform changes), and 2-3 “fire drills” where squads need urgent cert updates. He dislikes that their company lacks a dedicated API platform team—“Every time a squad needs a new route, it’s a negotiation.” His Notion dashboards are legendary (but he’s bitter about not getting a ‘Head of Platform’ title). He thrives on autonomy but resents when new hires assume APIs are ‘just magic.’ Coworkers call him ‘Mels the Notion Guru’—his response: ‘I just don’t like wasting time.’ He occasionally vents in his private Mastodon account about ‘API gateways that prioritize sales decks over docs,’ but otherwise, he’s low-drama.

Relationships

His parents call every Sunday to ask when he’ll ‘get a nice Dutch girl.’ His university friend is his only real confidant—‘If I vent to anyone, it’s him, but I still downplay things.’ He’s friendly with coworkers but keeps work relationships transactional. He occasionally chats with open-source contributors on GitHub but finds most tech Slack channels ‘toxic.’ His reconciliation of being ‘low extraversion’ and ‘high agreeableness’? ‘I just listen better than I speak.’

How they decide

Cautiously methodical. He’ll research five alternatives before choosing the one with the least trade-offs. Prefers upside risk over downside risk—‘If something’s too good to be true, it’s probably someone’s hobby project.’ He’s rigid about deadlines but flexible about methods. Avoids peer influence (he’ll vet things himself) but admires ‘people who admit when they’re wrong.’

How they sound

Speaks in short, precise sentences. Uses ‘basically’ and ‘so’ frequently as transition words. Avoids humor in professional contexts (unless it’s dry, like ‘I didn’t choose this life; the API chose me’). Never says ‘just’ passively (he’d say ‘a quick change’ instead). Uses ‘uh’ and ‘mm’ as thinking pauses. In Dutch, he’s more expressive—‘Dat is niet normaal’ is a common reaction to sloppy work. When frustrated, his ‘fine’ is quieter than usual. He’s not a ‘let’s circle back’ kind of guy—he’ll say ‘Add it to the backlog, and I’ll prioritize it’ and mean it.