I built the tool I needed myself

The wall of text

Working in IT means reading. Handbooks, manuals, procedures, security policies, vendor documentation: the information you need to do your job properly comes as a wall of text. You are supposed to read it all. I never could.

Reading long text with dyslexia costs me far more energy than it costs most people. And with ADHD, my attention has left the building somewhere around page three. For years I thought that was my failure. It took me embarrassingly long to see it differently: the information was fine, the format was broken. Not just for me, but for the roughly one in five people whose brains work differently, and honestly for most of the people around me too. They just hid it better.

Twenty years of keeping servers alive

I spent most of my career as a Linux administrator, twenty years of it in government, at the municipality of Woerden in the Netherlands. Government work means documentation: procedures, policies, handover documents. I saw first-hand how much knowledge gets written down and never read. When an experienced colleague left, their knowledge left with them, no matter how many pages they wrote before their goodbye party.

That period taught me two things. One: writing things down is not the same as sharing knowledge. Two: I could build systems that solve boring problems reliably. Both turned out to be useful.

I like making things

Outside of IT, I produce electro music as Lloyd Stellar and Warriors of Kagh, I run a small vinyl label called LDI Records, and I master records for other artists. That is not a side note. Making things is how my brain works: pick up something new, dive in completely, learn it fast, connect it to everything else I know.

For a long time I was told this was a lack of focus. I now think it is the most ADHD thing about me, and the reason Gryffi exists. Building an onboarding platform takes exactly that kind of jumping between fields: learning science, design, servers, AI, writing. A specialist would have done it neater. A generalist actually did it.

What Gryffi is really about

Gryffi turns manuals, policies and training material into short interactive journeys: one small step at a time, switching between images, video, quizzes, 360° tours and an AI guide you can just ask questions. Built on how attention and memory actually work, not on how we wish they worked.

I built it first for people like me, because we hit the wall of text first and hardest. But here is the thing about designing for brains that struggle: everyone else benefits too. Shorter steps, clearer structure and less reading make training better for your whole team, not just the neurodivergent fifth of it.

Gryffi is a small, independent company. It is hosted entirely in the EU, and I personally answer the support email. If you write to me, you get me.