A crappy review of a crappy “LEGO” Brick Bank
I bought myself a replica of LEGO’s 2016 Brick Bank from a Chinese copycat brand and it went about as well as expected.
Flat Earth
Rendering text on a pixel grid
Fonts in macOS look different from text that’s been rendered in Windows, mostly due to different philosophies about font rendering.
This is a periodic reminder to add train emojis to your Slack workspaces
Spamming trains on Slack is likely to make some co-workers very happy and others very annoyed.
Get cheered on when you complete JIRA tickets
I built a completely useless Chrome extension that encourages people to complete their JIRA tickets (so I don’t have to).
My boulevard of broken side project dreams
I build a lot of side projects, but sadly many of them go sideways. This blog post lists some of the projects that never made it to production.
Let’s build a simple journey planner using SQL (part 3, that you can run yourself)
What’s better than a crappy train travel planner that runs on my machine? A crappy train travel planner that runs on YOUR machine!
Let’s build a simple journey planner using SQL (part 2 of probably more than 2)
Yet another blog post where I create an unmaintainable mess using our favourite yet very inadequate programming language, SQL.
Let’s build a simple journey planner using SQL (part 1 of definitely more than 1)
When all you have is a relational database, everything looks like a table. And you know what? It works! Sort of.
Visiting Dutch museums with a Netherlands Museum Pass
Life pro tip: get yourself a Museum Pass (aka Museumkaart) if you plan on visiting a lot of Dutch museums in one year.
Five things that are (not) made in Japan
Japan is good at inventing things, but in these five cases it was actually just good at adopting things.
Xi Jinping Thought on Software Engineering with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
Best practices for software engineering teams, derived from writings and speeches of Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping.
A (very incomplete) guide to Gen Z language
A survival guide for older people who can’t make heads or tails of the messages that their new Gen Z co-workers are writing in Slack.
Easter eggs on Chuniversiteit.nl
Easter is long gone, but that doesn’t mean everyone has found all the easter eggs on this website. Here’s a cheat sheet!
Spicy papers with a grain of salt, tl;dr edition
I spend a lot of time reading papers. I spend even more time summarising them. Now I made oversimplified summaries of those summaries.
阻住地球轉: Please move aside!
This month’s side project takes passive-aggressiveness against life’s daily obstacles to a whole new level.
Cube buses be bussin’
Imagine a world in which all buses are cube-shaped for absolutely no reason.
An analysis of Chinese restaurant names in the Netherlands
Is it just me or do all Chinese restaurant names look the same?
Tiny catastrophes with apostrophes
This is a brief public service announcement for anyone who occasionally uses apostrophes or single quotes (or both).
I went completely loco with some logos
Some old and current logos of well-known brands and organisations in the Netherlands (but not quite how you remember them).
Blursed async PHP: Dumb, but also kind of fun
There are decent, battle-tested ways to write asynchronous PHP, but that’s not what this article is about.
Why Wikipedia is weirder than you think
You’ll never look at Wikipedia the same way ever again.
Translate Dutch to English like it’s 1999
I spent three years building a web app that translates Dutch to bad English and the results are even worse than I expected.
How (not) to install WordPress on Kubernetes
Today we’re dragging LAMP into the 21st century in the worst possible way.
The big FAQ you never asked for
Finally, an article that provides answers to assorted questions that nobody ever asks.