Ardy Heijnekamp

I design and build digital infrastructure.

From a young age, I was fascinated by how information can be captured, structured, and preserved. When I was ten years old, I built my first database on a Commodore VIC-20, cataloging license plates from my neighborhood. What fascinated me was not the cars themselves, but the act of transforming observation into something structured and persistent.

This exploration continued on the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga, where I programmed games, experimented with early modem communication, and sent data between systems, long before the World Wide Web existed.

I later studied New Media in Utrecht, drawn to the intersection of technology, communication, and cognition.

Around the turn of the millennium, I became deeply interested in content management and the emerging web. While working within the labor movement, I developed a custom content management system to maintain and publish website content. This was my first experience designing systems that allowed information to be structured, updated, and sustained over time.

I continued this work in the agency world, helping organizations develop their digital presence and infrastructure. In 2006, I founded Tatemae as an independent digital practitioner, building websites and systems using open source platforms such as Joomla and WordPress.

Over time, my work evolved beyond building websites toward designing the underlying systems themselves: data models, pipelines, and infrastructure that allow information to persist, connect, and accumulate meaning.

Today, my work centers on identity, canonical data, and the architecture of systems that transform fragmented signals into structured, meaningful, and persistent records.

Alongside my infrastructure work, I am deeply interested in music, culture, and collective memory, and how digital systems can help preserve and connect them.

Infrastructure is not visible when it works well. But it shapes how organizations understand themselves, their users, and their world.

Over time, these systems become more than tools.

They become memory.