Hello World

Hello World, welcome to my blog! Originally the idea for my website was to showcase some my work, but since that part of the website is still in construction I decided to use this website as a personal blog as well.

I am a programmer and an entrepreneur. The desire to be my own boss was in me from a young age. The programming started as an after school hobby, because I wanted to create my own games. Eventually I switched to the wonderful world of the world wide web and I started to create my own websites. During most of the time I was in secondary education I was learning new programming languages and techniques using YouTube and websites like W3Schools.com

People often recommended that I’d turn my hobby in a profession. When I was about 17 years old I got paid for the first time. This were mostly small changes to existing websites based on WordPress. After about a year I started getting bigger projects. For these projects, Wordpress was no longer sufficient as a backbone, so I proposed using Laravel, a PHP framework where I had heard so much about.

Although I am a really big fan of Laravel, because of it’s simplicity and the ability for the fast creation of dynamic websites, the projects I worked on were a big step from the Wordpress websites I worked on prior. I can remember myself having lots of sleepless nights just because of the complexity. This resulted in some projects missing their deadlines.

Luckily, these experiences are behind me and I can only say that I’m very happy to have had them early on. It openend my eyes and taught me that I should take a more active role in the starting phase of a project by splitting the project in multiple smaller task. This made it easier to give a better time estimation and a more realistic planning. To this day I still find it hard to make good estimations and realistic plannings, but I noticed that if I want to improve this skill the only thing I can do is gather more experience, which is by just doing.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, I can say 2020 is my best year yet in the 3 years I work as a self employed programmer. I was a bit anxious when the virus came closer and ultimately also hit the Netherlands, but I still keep getting new requests from existing and new clients. Besides client work I now also work on my own projects in order to create more streams of income. This will, hopefully, build me passive income. Although a passive form of income usually makes you money without direct labour, the startup phase of such does require lots of effort and it isn’t easy. Having the required experience to be able to create a website or any other form of online business does really help you be more likely to succeed.

This was it for now. I hope you now have a good impression of me. Feel free to follow me on Instagram or send me a hello ;-)

This website will soon be expanded with some of my work and, of course, new posts so stay tuned!