About me

Well, let's say I tried… I finished VWO (pre-university education) in the early 1990-ies without putting in much effort and immediately started studying Philosophy and later Artificial Intelligence at the UVA (University of Amsterdam). However, I got distracted and dropped out.

During the AI programming courses, I was introduced to Unix and I was hooked. I replaced my Atari ST, which had been my m68k assembly and C playground, with an i386. I got a big stack of Slackware floppies and spent my time reading and writing code instead of attending university. The "free and open source" movement blew my mind, and I found my way to obtain knowledge.

After working low-level jobs for a couple of years, I met an old friend with whom I shared an interest in programming 6510 assembly way back when the C64 computer was ubiquitous. I told him what I was working on in my spare time, and a few days later, I met his boss at an IT company who hired me as a Unix C programmer.

After a year of doing maintenance and adding back-end features to their application for all the Unix flavors Oracle ran on, I got to write a web front-end for that application in Perl. When that was finished, I quit and spent all the money I had made by cycling the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail in 2000.

Back in the Netherlands I worked at three or four companies building web application back-ends. I got fed up with company life and started freelancing. My first customer was a company for which my father (who taught me how to program Basic and 6510 assembly on our C64) has build a back-office application for in the glazing business. They wanted to move from their FoxPro system to something web-based. That application is still running, and being maintained by me, today!

Later, an old colleague and friend, Joost, and I started our own company and have been building applications together, with the help of freelancers when needed.

Work

jomco.nl

Fediverse

floss.social/@rwv

Code

codeberg.org/rwv

More Code

sr.ht/~rwv

3D Models

printables