Me

Early 2025, my oldest daughter came home from school and had learned to play chess. She was so excited about the game that she even asked a board as her birthday gift. I, on the other hand, had never played chess and didn’t even know how the pieces moved. Trying to encourage and support her, I picked it up too and found my way to chess.com. I started watching chess content and the algorithm sucked me in. Before I knew it, I labeled myself an “adult improver” and set a goal to reach 1000 elo on two time controls: rapid and blitz. ...

I normally write this up at the end of the year, but circumstances made me push back this post for a few weeks. I use this annual post to look back at the year passed, and to look ahead to the year to come. I gave up on making resolutions in 2011. This year, I’m going to be naively ambitious again going into 2014. Compared to previous years, I feel more confident that I have a pretty good idea of what I want next. Just before the holidays, my fiancée and I spent the weekend out of town where we took a whole evening to modelstorm 2013 and the future. We used green and red post-its to list all positive and negative memories of 2013. We then categorized those, and defined concrete actions to avoid repeating negative experiences, and to increase the number of positive ones in 2014. Next to this technique, we used a timeline to plan some key milestones a few years ahead of time. ...

It’s that time of the year again where I take some time to look back on the year passed and peek at the year ahead. This is mostly a post I like to write up for myself, forcing reflection. The biggest personal changes this year were moving out of my parents’ place, and my girlfriend’s decision to study medicine after graduating as a Master of Arts earlier this year. I had no idea how things would turn out once we lived together, but so far we have been doing great. ...

Since the end of the year is approaching, I would like to look back on 2011 and take a peek at 2012. Unlike the years before, I’m hardly setting any goals this year. Interests change so quickly, and new opportunities present themselves so regularly, I feel like it might be ignorant to set these things in stone. My career The year started out interesting, working on a brand new product for fire departments at Ferranti Computer Systems. Although my role in this project should have been fairly satisfying, I still felt like my position back then failed to fill a certain void. That’s why I decided to take the leap into the Great Unknown. ...

My career I’m still working on the same projects as I was last year: Firestation Antwerp and Ghent. This year we did not build a lot of brand new things, but we have added a decent amount of new functionalities. Next to that there were a bunch of bugs to fix and technical debt to pay off. I learned a lot from the mistakes we made and refactoring makes you really think about what good and clean code should look like. ...

In this post I’m going to reflect on the year that’s almost finished and the year to come. I came up with a few topics that are worth discussing in this post. My career I don’t think I ever mentioned where I work. The first of January I will be working 18 months for Ferranti. The only company I’ve worked for since I graduated. The first project I’ve ever worked on was a rather big one. Firestation Antwerp. Last year we heard that sales scored another firestation for us (Firestation Ghent). So I’ve been working on these two projects since I started. ...