This personal site serves two goals:
- I’d like to have a place where I can share things with the world. I’m not going to limit myself to a single topic – I have a broad set of interests, and I might be publishing about each of those.
- It’s a playground for me to experiment with creating websites.
About the tech
Site generation
My previous website was built with WordPress. I’ve come to the conclusion that this was overkill. In recent years, static site generators have become popular, and I can see why. However, while the concept is simple, most of those generators have become fairly complex products. And I’ve realized that I like programming more than I like configuring. So I decided to roll my own generator. Not because I think I can do better than any of those matured tools, but because I prefer to just change the code, instead of figuring out how to configure a complex tool. So, this site is generated from a bunch of Markdown files, by a Python script of less than 400 lines. See the blog post about it for a bit more background.
Presentation: tech
For the presentation layer, I also decided to keep things simple. I don’t want to configure a SCSS framework, and then apply a theme to it. Modern CSS is pretty okay. I can write it by hand. (With some help from an AI friend or two…) More about this in my blog post about it.
Presentation: aesthetics
Color palette
I have been a fan of the Solarized color palette by Ethan Schoonover for many years. So why not apply it to my own website? I really like the result! It’s easy on the eyes, and works well both in normal mode and dark mode.
Fonts
I’m a little bit of a font nerd. When looking around for good royalty free fonts, I stumbled upon indestructible type*. This type foundry has some really elegant “classics” in their portfolio, and most of them are free to use on the web. I chose Besley for most text and Jost for the headings. I think those make for a nice combination. Nothing too fancy, but still looking sophisticated.
About me
I’m a software engineer, living in Harderwijk, The Netherlands. I’ve worked for various companies over the years, and currently are working for Leap. My family is very important to me, so I dedicate a lot of my time to be with my wife and kids. Having cooking as one of my hobbies is easy to combine with family time, which is great. Apart from that, whenever I’ve time left to spend for myself, I like photography, tinkering with my smart home and playing the piano.