About Daan(.dev)

‘t Grachtje Over 11
1625 PG Hoorn
The Netherlands

CoC ID: 80210317
EU VAT ID: NL003407911B80

I started hobbying with programming when I was 11, with a book called ‘Visual Basic for Dummies’. It helped me to build a game where you had to catch bananas thrown by a monkey.

At age 16 I built my first website for my ‘street gang’ i.e. a group of 10 – 20 teens doing stupid things and looking for an easier way to share photo’s of our shenanigans and house parties. It also contained a message board, where we could send invites to each other for birthdays and house parties e.g. Halloween and New Year’s Eve. In a way, you could say I invented Facebook back in 2001. 🙂

Then I started blogging in 2009 — sharing poetry and short stories. More and more, I started to know WordPress.

Pingdom already existed back then, but having a speedy website didn’t consist of much more than having a VPS and using aggressive caching mechanisms such as APC — the A doesn’t stand for Aggressive, though. 😉

With the release of Pagespeed Insights (PSI) in 2013 I started getting acquainted with the principles of Website Optimisation. While optimizing my own website, PSI kept nagging me about reducing the amount of DNS lookups, due to its own tool Google Analytics. So I figured out a way to load Google Analytics locally, and released the first version of CAOS in the summer of 2015.

I decided to share my knowledge in a blogpost in a year later.

That’s when things really started taking off.

In that same year Google Fonts was revamped and the internet was flooded with the usage of Google Fonts. I started using them as well, but I couldn’t afford losing my perfect scores on Pagespeed Insights and Pingdom. Practice what you preach and all that.

I started looking for ways to cache Google Fonts and in the summer of 2018 OMGF was accepted into the WordPress.org repository.

As my plugins kept gaining notoriety, my blog started gaining visitors. I updated the blog post about WordPress optimization, which brought me my first actual client.

Daan, the WordPress optimization specialist was born.

That project went well and I started carefully introducing my services to people who contacted me about optimization matters. And after a few clients, I decided I should turn my hobby into a business and after CAOS and OMGF, Fast FW Press was born.

Now CAOS and OMGF together account for over 200.000+ active users!

Now you’ll probably see why the tagline says: