About
I’m a software engineer at Spatie in Antwerp, Belgium. We’re a small web agency that has been around for quite a while, and we also make our own products.
Laravel is my bread and butter, and its ecosystem feels like home. I still love programming: good languages and frameworks, code that feels nice to work with, and architecture that holds up. I just write less of the code myself now, and break fewer things by accident.
Outside of work I solder, 3D print, look after a few servers and slowly build a synthesizer. I like opening up hardware and software to see how they work, and I usually learn the most when something breaks.
It started at fourteen. I wasn’t allowed to use my laptop on school nights. I saw that as a hardware problem. So I built a computer from spare parts, hid it behind my desk and used the TV in my room as a screen, through a VGA to S-video cable I soldered myself. I coded late at night in 480i, and every time I heard footsteps outside my door, I switched the TV to a random channel.
Around the same time, some friends and I ran a server hosting company over Teamspeak. It was not, strictly speaking, legal, but it felt very grown-up.
Not much has changed since then, except the resolution is higher.