The hardest software problems aren't technical. They live in organizations that have grown faster than their own processes — where the business no longer fully understands how it works, and where new software has to fit realities that were never written down.
That's the kind of work I do.
I'm Maarten De Wilde, an independent software architect and engineer based in Belgium. Over the past eighteen years I've worked across very different organizations — McKinsey Solutions, SD Worx, and currently ArcelorMittal — but the work has always come down to the same thing: translating complex business realities into software that fits them, instead of the other way around.
My expertise is in .NET, Azure, and Angular, but the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is understanding what a business actually needs, holding conflicting stakeholder perspectives together, and making architectural choices that still work five years from now.
Mantares is the company through which I take on long-term client engagements.
Designing systems that fit the business today and can evolve as it changes — without collapsing under the weight of their own abstractions.
Staying close to the code, because architecture decoupled from implementation rarely survives contact with reality.
Working directly with business stakeholders to turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans, and helping development teams make sense of the business context they're building for.
I work best in industrial, enterprise, and data-intensive environments where the complexity is real and the stakes are operational.
The best conversations usually start with a problem that has been hard to solve — not with a job description.