#begin

(println “Hello, world!”)

Ugh, how cliché to start a developer blog but nonetheless, I would like to announce that I’m going to start a blog about anything programming.

I have been thinking about this for a while now, mostly because I read a lot computer science books and papers, watch many conferences and of course spend many hours programming. I wanted to write down and track things I have learned or need to remember, so why not write it all down into a blog and share it with anyone interested.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back and what really inspired me to finally start this was not one, but two, blogs I read about personal branding. So kudos to you Clyde Valentine.

So let’s start this blog with a small introduction of who I am, what I do and what my interests are; My name is Ruben Hamers and I am a software developer living in The Netherlands. I started programming over 13 years ago and have been practicing it professionally for over 7 years at the time of writing this.

After high school I directly singed up for an education in game development in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Because, what 16 year old does not want to spend his time playing video games in class… Oh boy, was I wrong… We actually needed to design and program these games without any prior experience, so yeah it was a pretty steep learning curve. Especially when I look back at the school system here in The Netherlands; there was no such thing as programming in our high school back then, hopefully that has changed.

After I successfully finished this game development degree I continued my studies with a bachelor’s in software engineering. At this point the learning curve was not that steep anymore. There were a few though courses but nothing too bad.

During my bachelor I also started a job on the side as a student worker where I programmed parts of serious games and simulations. I rolled into this job due to my prior experience with Unity3D, which was pretty new at that time. And I stayed with this job for over 7 years.

While working there I also started a study for a Master’s degree in software engineering as soon as I got my bachelor. Back to the steep learning curve I was… There were a lot of difficult courses in this master when I think back, but I have learned a great deal from it. People in software industry often joke about how a degree is worthless since it will never match up with things you actually do on the job.

I still agree with that a certain amount since it is truly unacceptable students are not learned how to properly work with things like GIT, popular IDE’s or CLI interfaces. This stuff needs to be a very high priority for new students. But yeah, I learned many practical things during my master like; how to properly do security engineering, multi-threading (which is still hard), design patterns, when to apply them and when it may be better to not blindly implement something using a design pattern if it does not add any value, software architecture, Meta-programming and how to do static analysis of the code to look for common code smells and other kinds of technical debt or things like cyclomatic complexity, and believe it or not, a course on model checking and using temporal logic to extract truth from the code made a really large impact on, me and my work, as a developer (but that is probably something for a later blog). But also courses on areas like software life cycle and evolution.

I finished my master with a thesis on protocol languages where I wrote a DSL in Clojure that protects users from incorrect threading protocol implementations by checking if threads are allowed to communicate considering a given specification. I will link to the thesis[1] and publication[2] in the references.

Now, back to the main story; This blog is going to be about things I learn or practice on a day by day basis, read in many books or papers, hear on a plethora of podcasts I listen to or see on interesting conference talks, and lately, Zoom/Teams calls of course. Now, as I described earlier I have been reading etc. for many years so this blog will also include things I read in the past. Like book reviews for example. There might also be some really off-topic blogs on here since programming is not the only thing I do. I have a lovely family, and I also like sports (cross-fit, calisthenics, running) and reading about nutrition, longevity, biohacking and other things health related. So I might add random blogs on here in an off topic section where I talk about the latest awesome findings on coffee (liquid code right?). The off-topic section might even include some personal development things (like how to manage stress and stay sane as a developer) and maybe even some non-fiction books I read.

So to wrap this first blog up: As of now I do not know the format, frequency or length of these blogs, I just know I’m going to write more in the future. I can already think of many things I want to write about but it all takes time and effort. So I’ll have to see when the next one will be published.

If you came this far into my introductory blog, I salute you for being patient and hope that you enjoyed it.

#end

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References

[1] Thesis – https://gitlab.com/ruben.hamers/Discourje

[2] Publication – https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-45190-5_15