Samuel Dirksz · Portfolio
Things I've built.
Twenty-five years of building, across wildly different materials. Computers, bikes, a coffee bar, a public funding service, and now AI systems. The instinct never changed: learn it by hand, make it usable, build something people gather around.
I learn a domain by hand, make the complicated part usable, and a community tends to form around it. That is the thread through everything below. The materials change, the move repeats. It is also why AI came naturally: it is just the newest material.
01 · Now
AI & automation
100+ working builds
Among them 30+ custom AI agent workflows: live data APIs, web crawling, persistent storage, cost control and quality gates. I direct, the AI builds, I keep the judgment.
The intelligent garden
An IoT sensor-based garden and greenhouse where AI makes the climate decisions from the monitored data. Same method as the client work, different stakeholders (fourteen runner ducks and my wife).
Agents & optimisation flows
A reusable arsenal of AI agents and automations, refined and carried forward, so each build starts further ahead than the last.
The toolkit
Claude Code, Codex, Dyad, MCP servers, PyRunner, ActivePieces, Azure OpenAI (EU), self-hosted on Coolify / Hetzner.
Privacy by default
EU data hosting, secure credential handling, GDPR-compliant analytics. Built in from the start, not bolted on.
02 · Things that went live
Products & platforms
MinSide portal
Recruited and ran a 20-user beta community feeding a team of six. Beta live in six months.
En Vei Inn
One digital front door to public business support, across five agencies.
StudioAssistant.io
Product and community work at The Audio Hunt: market research, user community, messaging for a studio/producer web app.
Utleiekalkulator
A rental-tax calculator scoped early at Digital Revisor, still the site's biggest traffic driver years later.
03 · Built from nothing
Companies founded
Pristine Fixed Gear
The Netherlands' first fixed-gear specialist shop. Webshop, blog, forum, races, brand collaborations. "Small but religious," the press said.
Meesterknecht
Amsterdam's first road-cycling store, clubhouse and coffee bar in one. One of "25 favourite bicycle spots in the world" (Soigneur).
Tweakheat
First company, founded at 18. Custom PC building, repair and game consoles. Where the build-it-yourself instinct started.
04 · Six years at Innovation Norway
Public-sector impact
2,000+ founder calls
Daily phone shifts on the national startup helpline. The front door of the whole organization.
~700 startups assessed
Grant applications evaluated for viability: business plans, budgets, teams, market.
Verneombud
Elected safety representative: working environment, Miljøfyrtårn reporting, HMS checklists, and the confidential point of contact for colleagues.
Digital transformation, hands-on
Pushed my way onto a product team a year deep in pure discovery, mapping what advisors already knew from daily contact with founders. Shipped a shared-snippets tool for repeat questions, the moment UX, developers and the problem finally lined up.
05 · Off the clock
Craft & community
The småbruk
Bought with my wife Rena eight years ago, after years in the Dutch rat race. A smallholding run on permaculture, with a cat and fourteen runner ducks: the dream that pulled us to Norway, still growing.
Slåtterock festival
Coordinated end to end as deputy chairman of Vevring Grendalag: booking, website, social media, posters, merchandise. Volunteer-run.
Endeavor Woodworks
Years of wood-turning and making, drawn to Japanese simplicity. Objects with a story, made to last.
06 · Systems running
What is actually running
The lists above say what I have built. This one says what is standing and running right now, what it is made of, and how mature it is. Prototypes are listed as prototypes.
AI visibility and analytics
AI Visibility Tracker
Tracks whether a brand gets mentioned and cited when people ask AI assistants. Five brands, around 96 prompts, roughly 3,600 measurements a month. Built on an open source foundation with my own feature layer on top.
TypeScript · TanStack Start · Postgres · pg-boss · Coolify
SEO check
Public self-serve audit. Six API calls in parallel, a composite score across five dimensions, and an email sequence that segments on the result. Degrades quietly when one API fails instead of crashing.
Python · PyRunner · DataForSEO · PageSpeed · Emailit
AI readability scan
Any URL in, 0 to 100 out, with a ready-made instruction a coding agent can run to fix what it found. Uses a free, keyless fallback for JS rendering so it can be handed to someone else.
Python · PyRunner
Automation and infrastructure
The PyRunner integration
The host runs one file per script. The answer is a source bundler that flattens a multi-file project, a shim translating environment variables into command-line flags, and a datastore used as an async result bus. API keys never enter the model's context.
Python · MCP · DataStore
Uptime and deploy watchdogs
Both were written after named incidents: a silent four-and-a-half-hour overnight outage, and four hung deploys that filled the disk to 91 percent. They re-alert every half hour with how long it has been down, not just once.
Python · Coolify API · Emailit
Indexing robot
Daily job that reads the sitemap, checks indexing status and submits what is missing, with hard quota caps and a permanent cache so confirmed URLs never burn quota twice. Runs for one site today.
Python · Search Console · Indexing API · IndexNow
web-gold-starter
A starter where the build fails if the SEO or accessibility rules are broken. The gates encode two mistakes we actually made: a canonical URL without a trailing slash that dropped pages from Google's index, and a robots setup that blocked AI crawlers on a live site.
Astro 6 · custom build gates
Small things built because they were needed
Digital NDA signing
The browser and the server each build the same agreement text independently and hash it. Both checksums are printed in the PDF. Most e-signing proves that something was signed. This proves what was signed.
Python · ReportLab · Pillow · static HTML
The greenhouse
Sensors on the smallholding report home, a scheduled job pushes a snapshot onward, and the website only ever reads that snapshot. No sensor credentials sit on a public web server.
Homey · PyRunner · Next.js
Smallholding guest guide
Zero dependencies, zero build step. The content lives in one file, and a feature flag switches off the whole house-sitter half when we do not need it. Pulls weather from Yr for the farm's own coordinates.
Plain HTML · nginx · Coolify
Lynus.ai
A caseworker describes a manual process, the system turns it into a checklist where each step is run by its own agent, grounded in the organisation's own rulebook with mandatory human sign-off. No users yet.
Next.js · Postgres · Drizzle · Anthropic
Different materials. Same instinct. Still building.