About janjongerden.nl

I created this website mostly for my own pleasure, and hopefully sometimes a visiting friend or stranger also finds something worthwhile to read.

Share ideas, knowledge, or technical solutions

Most of my blog posts are of a technical nature. I write things down to preserve a piece of knowledge or nifty hack I learned about. Writing often helps me clear my thoughts and better understand a problem. On the other hand an article may help someone to solve a hard-to-google problem like getting my scanner to work, or a page can be a way to share a list of my favorite restaurants in Berlin with a friend about to visit that city.

Write for fun and profit

In software engineering, writing skills are essential. The things you have to write range from multipage architecture documents or project proposals to user guides or feature requests. At the smallest scale you write a comment in the code, think up the proper name for a variable, or write a concise pull request description.

What I am trying to say is that, as with all skills, except Russian roulette, the more you practice, the better you get at it. So this website is also a way for me to get better at writing. Or die trying, just like in Russian roulette.

Write blogging software

I know you should never roll your selfmade, half-baked solution for a problem that has been solved a gazillion times before, by smarter people, that wrote well-tested and feature-complete software they let you use for free. However, hobby projects are a nice exception to this rule, and it was fun to write a super simple static page generator in Kotlin for this blog.

The current state of the code is on the sloppy side, but it gets the job done. As it is my very own blog, I am confidently awaiting any lawsuits. To add insult to injury, I mixed the blog software and content into one big GitHub repository.

About me

I am Jan, and have been writing software professionally since the late 19hundreds. I still like creating software to solve problems for customers, friends, or myself - something I nowadays do as a freelancer. I studied computer science in Delft, the city where I live to this day.