It's tempting to focus a page such as this on professional skills and work experience, because somehow that's the standard we set as humans. The first thing we ask when we meet someone is “so what do you do”.
What do I do? A little bit of everything. I want to do it all. I want to live 10 lifetimes to do all I can. My job is simply one of my endless hobbies I managed to turn in to a job.

If I do have to have to describe myself in a sentence I'd say I'm a restless creative who cannot sit still and constantly wants to create and immerse. I'm a dreamer, a night owl and constantly on several train of thoughts. If I have to keep in concise I'd say I love making things. Be that online, digital, physical or even mentally. Not drawing though, I really suck at drawing.

However between that last sentence and this one, I started daily drawing exercises. I'm actively trying to get better, and not just at drawing. Also at writing, crafting, painting, airbrushing and thinking about all of that stuff. All while also trying to understand the human condition we all find ourselves in. The thing I'm confident in saying I'm already pretty good at is (web)development though. Been doing that since our modems still made funny noises and your mom would yell she's on the phone.

It's safe to say web development is one of the central pillars of my existence. It ties in to all my other traits. I can vividly remember a conversation I had with the old man behind the counter at the bookstore where I bought my "internet magazine" with included CD with development tools on it.
I was 9 at the time, and I proudly proclaimed I'm gonna make a website! On the internet! I remember the guy being very kind about it and he cheered me on, and asked me to come and show the results when I have any.

It took me 2 more years to have something actually online, and I did go back to that bookstore but the guy had retired since then, and I never followed up on it. It was hosted on Homestead, one of the first brand new sort-of free hosting companies. The URL was longer then this paragraph but I had it memorized and when we had our "Introduction to The Internet!" class in the local library, I shocked kids and teachers alike by showing off I was way ahead of all of them.

Somehow I failed to make it big in the dotcom bubble (granted, I was 11 when that bubble popped), and since then I've become too much of an anti-capitalist to want to make it big on the misplaced dreams of another. But I stayed a developer. From notepad to notepad++ to Dreamweaver to Flash sites to PHP and now in the thick of it with the wild west of JS libraries and all their competing standards.

Keen eyed visitors might notice this website uses no 'standards'. No libraries, no CMS, no SEO, no systems other then the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some royaly free paintings. I work with and on giant interconnected systems on a daily basis. I find genuine joy in writing this website by hand in a single document.

I love the term 'maker' because it says nothing and everything. Maker of what? Yes! It started at a young age where I had no creative outlet until I saw a computer running DOS, and floppy disks with programs and games on them. I quickly saw a path to expression fucking around with that machine and fiddling with it's internals, much to the dismay of my parents.

It wasn't until into my twenties where I finally gathered enough courage to try and use my hands to create stuff, rather then a keyboard. I started some simple woodworking projects and being the proper nerd I am, I gobbled up all there is to know about the craft. Sadly, theory and practice are different domains, but at least I knew what to aim for.

Since then I got into crafting, too and I'll admit; I'm getting dangerously close to owning a model train set. All the parts are there, I paint miniatures, craft terrain pieces and write stories about them. I find fitting music to go with scenes and try to escape into these fantasies.

And with all these small hobbies together, there's solid development of creative problem solving which is I guess the reason humans do anything to challenge themselves. I'm no absolute king of any of my endeavors, but I value the process of learning about each and every one of them way more then being the best anyway.

Fellow nerds will understand why someone would label themselves as such, for most others it would be an insult. Others still might say that "geek" is the friendlier term. But alas, as a nerd I must correct this false narrative!

While both terms overlap quite a bit, the general consensus is that a geek is a passionate fan of a subject, whereas a nerd is a passionate practitioner of a subject. A Star Wars geek might know every single line of dialogue from the franchise. A Star Wars nerd is most likely into the science behind spaceships and time-travel.

Personally, I don't care for Star Wars in any way, but that's a different topic entirely. I think of myself as a nerd because I'm always fascinated by how things work. I can be a fan of a show, game or film, but that's always down to particular parts of them. Like a stellar acting performance which gets me thinking about intricacies of characterization and how a skillful actor can use their own person to convey feeling.

I have many fascinations, be they technical, historical, practical or philosophical. All these things combine together in my love for D&D as a forever-DM which can have me researching soil compositions in arid deserts while painting miniatures to be part of a fictional re-creation of the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

And one thing has always been true, D&D is for nerds.

Hey, you. I hope this page has given you some idea of who I am, and if not, here's some more:

I write about music at DeMaandagavond which is also another webdevelopment playground. If you wanna know what I'm listening to right now, Last.fm is still going strong. I write short stories and other stuff at Substack where I also restack things on my feed.

If you're looking for more professional based data, maybe you dare to visit LinkedIn but I do want to warn you to not get sucked in to its Facebook-like mania going on there. My resume is mostly free of drama, though.

Furthermore this seems like a good space to shout out The Met's online collection of royalty free art that so graceously provided some color and personality to my otherwise very bland website.

Of course I would shout out all the artists who made these paintings, but they have never heard of the internet, don't care about clout and are long-dead anyway. Still, love the works, thanks!