Welcome / rant This is a webpage belonging to me, the author of this text, Gerard Westerhof.
I'm currently working as a programmer for Quintel Intelligence.
I created this webpage in plain text as an ode to this. I agree with the philosophy of keeping any application as simple and small as humanly possible. This way, it does what it does and bugs will almost never appear. There will be nothing wrong with this webpage due to the simplicity of it. I never have to update the technical aspects of it and neither will a user complain that something is not working right. This webpage is for the soul purpose of displaying text and distributing information and for that matter, this webpage is perfect.
The problem with most webpages is that the browsers that are supposed to render them, don't interpret them the same way. Every browser has their own philosophy, which leads to their own implementations. Not a lot is being standardized or made backwards-compatible, which results in a mess in which designers and programmers of the web have to frustrate themselves with. This leads to a significant amount of hair pulling which is not healthy for anybody.
For all those developers and designers I give you a cat (with a bow tie):
/\___/\
( o o )
( =^= )
( >x< )
( )
( )))))))))))
See this as a personal project in which there will be absolutely none of that. A little bit of developer heaven, as I would like to call it, in which I'd like to present myself.
`whoami` I am Gerard Westerhof, a guy living (which you can guess from the top level domain) in the Netherlands. I started building my first HTML website back in 2006 with nothing more than notepad on a Windows machine. Right now I'm making advanced Ruby programs in nothing more than vim.
I studied information and communication technology at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (in English that would be called the University of applied science). I learned to use and despise Java, PHP and C++ and to learn and love: Ruby and JavaScript.
Languages I speak in order of frequent use and how much I like using them:
Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, Bash, Python
Languages I am willing to learn in no particular order:
Elixir, Go, C, Rust
Languages I speak but intentionally left out of the above:
Java, PHP, C++, C#
Experience Like said I started writing my first webpage in HTML back in 2006 when I was 14 years old. I learned how to write my first bits of CSS, JavaScript and PHP and from that point on I was starting on a route to the tremendous and disastrous world of information technology. I finished my University of applied science within four years which was paid for by my government, for which they'll receive a modest thank you. During that time I enrolled in two companies. The first of which was Gridline in Amsterdam. Here I learned the basics of Ruby Of Rails, lots of jQuery and JavaScript. And ofcourse: how to behave nicely in a company setting, all the nice things that come from morning stand-ups and the horrible accuracy of time registration applications.
The other company was Holder for which I was mainly responsible for a crowdfunding platform called Symbid and their gaming counterpart called Gambitious. I learned a lot of Ruby (on Rails), I learned how to make your own gems, advanced Linux, what sleep deprivation means, how horrible SOAP is and bits of Swift, Go, NodeJS and lots of NullPomino. Later on I started working for that same company and after a few years I was ready for something new.
Currently I work at Quintel in Amsterdam where I'm expanding my Ruby knowledge while trying to make the world a bit of a nicer place. And they have the best lunch ever. Also I learned how to use vim which is way faster than boring old sublime text, geany or gedit.
In short:
Quintel | current
Holder | 2 years
Gridline | 6 months
I contributed to: etmoses [github] | etmodel [github] | etengine [github] | lastfmdv [github] | opgemarkt-enquete [github] | symbid | gambitious | debrinkobdam
Free time In my free time I'm ~70% busy with music and ~30% with other programming (mainly my raspberry pi). I have a vinyl collection habit which you can follow here. And a music listening habit which you can follow here. I play guitar since about the same age at which I learned how to program.
Music: I basically love music a lot in all forms, shapes and sizes. I like the history of it, the impact it makes on a person and the so called 'magic' of it. I had a blog once which was called Kofferbaque in which I tried to breakdown and describe the 'magic' of an album or a piece of music in the form of a review. The thing I found out though, is that it will give you an insight into the things you like and don't like about a piece of music, at the price of enjoying it less due to the over-thinking.
I also used the same alias when DJ'ing the latest garage/psychedelic/indie madness. The DJ'ing still remains a hobby, which is now something I'm expressing under the alias Drunken Marias (based on the song 'Drunken Maria' by The Monks). In this case it's more 60s / soul and funk oriented.
Programming: I own a raspberry pi which is used as a part-time digital servant, media-player and torrent machine. It has basically introduced me to Python and bits of C. As a digital servant it sends me my train schedule every morning.
Likes / Dislikes Like: Good small code, music, playing guitar, the sun, the environment, hedgehogs, incense, vinyl records, cats, bananas, naan-bread, 'hagelslag', lightning storms, pizza, ubuntu, arch, vim, chocolate milk, nasi, TED, cheese (any type of cheese), oranges, reading, cynicism, sarcasm, absurdity, Söbbeke stracciatella yogurt (that stuff is amazing), baths, massages, science-fiction, koala bears.
Dislike: CMS's, Java, recruiters, advertising, slow trains, slow wi-fi, old people, crying baby's, smell of cigarettes from people I don't know (yes, I'm talking to you neighbor), stupidity, fruit-flies, the United States of Murica, Windows, OSX, xenophobia, the RT8723AE wifi driver, misuse of information, the dishes, buzzword-overkill.
Contact Underneath this text there will be some of my contact information. I am assuming that everybody using this information, is using it wisely. My general tendency for any advertising company is to mark the e-mail/tweet/thingy as spam and never read or buy anything from that company again. Recruiters are accepted if the actual company name for whom they are recruiting is well readable in the e-mail or the text is copied and pasted from the company's website which makes an internet search rather easy. If not, the recruiters faith will be the same as that of the advertising company.
gerard{at}grdw.nl | github | @grdw1992 | so