Projects
Ever since my dad taught me my first few lines of BASIC, programming has been my passion. I'll present the highlights from recent to old:
Biome
As of recently, I have become a lead maintainer of the Biome project, building
tooling for web developers in Rust. My main areas of contribution right now
are
plugin support, for which I've integrated the GritQL language into the project, and multi-file analysis.
Sudoku Pi
A refreshing take on a mobile Sudoku game, designed together with
my wife, and built with Bevy in
Rust. The game's in the
App Store
and the source code is on
GitHub.
Fiberplane
I was a Principal Software Engineer at Fiberplane, where we built exciting
DevOps tooling. As part of their efforts, I created
fp-bindgen, a
bindings generator for full-stack WASM plugins. I also built a Rich Text editor in Rust and React and implemented their Operational Transformation algorithm.
Speakap
I was also a Principal Software Engineer at Speakap, where I worked for over
7 years. I was lead of their frontend team, occassionally helped out the
Android team with work on React Native, developed their real-time chat and
notifications service, and worked on their customer integrations service.
Some open-source projects that I created for them are
text-clipper and
Selectivity.js.
PlainText
PlainText is a MUD engine I originally built in C++ and JavaScript as a hobby.
Later it was rewritten in Rust, mainly to gain experience with the language.
Hyves
Hyves used to be the largest social network of the Netherlands. I worked
there for five-and-a-half years, leading the team that created the Hyves
Desktop suite using C++/Qt and web technologies. I also developed several
server-side features in PHP and worked on their chat server created using
Stackless Python. Finally, I also worked on their mobile stack creating hybrid
PhoneGap applications for Symbian, Android, iOS and BlackBerry. Symbian in
particular was a fun one, as I first had to built the PhoneGap container
itself in C++ :)
An open-source project (now hopelessly outdated) I developed as part of my
employment there was
Woodpecker, an SCSS
compiler written in Python.
Distributed friend graph database
For my university's master's project, which I also did at Hyves, I created
a proof-of-concept for a distributed friend graph database in C++. It was
able to efficiently retrieve friend recommendations as well as determine
whether any two people shared a connection in the third degree.
KDE project
During my time at university I made several contributions to the KDE project
on the side. From the search bar for the Konqueror web browser and the type-ahead-find
feature in its KHTML rendering engine to support for the Windows RDP protcol
in the KDE Remote Desktop Client application. For the latter, rather than
reimplementing the RDP protocol, I created a patch for the
rdesktop application so that its X11
window could be embedded into other windows, which was then used by KRDC.
Real-time raytracing engine
For my university's bachelor's project me and three fellow students developed
a PoC real-time raytracing engine in C++ with CUDA support. Of course, given
the hardware at the time, this was only feasible on low resolutions using
various shortcuts, but it was an interesting project nonetheless.
Aukyla
During my first part-time job, I worked as a solo developer in a
small automation firm that lead to the
formation of Aukyla Software, where I did what every programmer did at the
time: Create their own PHP CMS. I created the
Aukyla PHP Framework, upon which I built ADMS, an intranet-focused Document Management System, and Aukyla Site
Manager, which powered several public websites at the time.
Qivrit
In order to help myself and fellow classmates in high-school improve our
natural language skills, I developed a little Windows application using Borland
C++ Builder. The concept was simple: You enter the lists of all the words
with their translations, and the program will question you on your knowledge
of them afterwards. I don't think I have the source to this application anymore,
but years later, as I made an attempt to learn Hebrew, I wrote a similar
program called Qivrit. This one was also written in C++, but using Qt and
tests both knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet as well as basic vocabulary.
Chunky's Challenge
One of my oldest hobby projects is a game: Adventure. If my memory serves
me right, the first version was created in QBASIC. When I started using KDE,
I made a port called
KAdventure. Currently, I'm
in the process of creating a remake called Chunky's Challenge, rewritten
using Bevy, under our Couch Chilis
banner.