Posts

My first open source project

📅 Nov 20, 2015 — 🧮 681 words — 🏷️ tech

Since november last year I started working on the HabboAPI project. While it is not my first repository, and maybe also not the first serious project (that would be my attempt of the RWS library), it's the first where I went the extra mile to create documentation, tests, continuous integration and Packagist support. I also intend to support this and hope to see other people contribute. So far I have one favourite!

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Move to Jekyll

📅 Aug 19, 2015 — 🧮 129 words — 🏷️ tech

So I moved my site to Jekyll and Github Pages. The reason was that I wanted to get rid of my hosted VPS solution which I didn’t use at all. I had great plans of making lots of small websites, but that never really planned out. I also wanted to get rid of the 500ms page loads of Wordpress (yes, I’m sure you can make that better). All I need for my blog is a static website.

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Dutch Open Hackathon

📅 Sep 25, 2014 — 🧮 1176 words — 🏷️ tech personal

Last weekend I attended the Dutch Open Hackathon in the UP building (previously known as IJ-toren) in Amsterdam. I went there as part of team 'Pi Ducks'. The team consisted of some colleagues from bol.com (where I started working in July) and a front-end designer we met through Twitter. We had a pretty broad range of skills in one team! Good morning Amsterdam! Billie got hacked! Tired of coding? Take a 'flight' to chillzone.

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meter; the HTML5 element

📅 May 14, 2014 — 🧮 427 words — 🏷️ tech web

I'm amazed at how often I still "discover" a new HTML5 element. I say discover because really they're all written down in specs. But then again, who reads specs for their enjoyment? Today I discovered the meter-element (by first discovering the progress-element). They're essentially the same, except that <meter> also adds some sugary deliciousness in the form of colouring. It's here that you should note that IE10 (and higher) only support <progress> at the moment and not <meter>.

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Piwik, a free open-source analytics tool

📅 Mar 5, 2014 — 🧮 250 words — 🏷️ tech

I have been using Piwik for a couple of months and I love it. I started using it first at my internship at leadelephant.com, not really as an analytics tool, but more as a data collection tool. The main goal of Piwik is an analytics tool, a direct competitor to Google Analytics. But it's really more than that. Like the data collection method I just mentioned, it could also be a community monitoring tool, which is how we use it at Habbies.

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Akismet doesn't cut it anymore, utilize Cloudflare against spam

📅 Feb 27, 2014 — 🧮 200 words — 🏷️ tech

Spam queue in Wordpress I have been noticing a severe drop in spam in my comment queue. I used to have to delete anywhere from 5 to 10 comments a day in the queue with just Akismet. Now there's not one comment.. 99.99% of the time. I didn't really think anything of it until I just realized why this change occurred; I had enabled Cloudflare for my blog. Cloudflare saving requests and thus MBs Cloudflare acts as somewhat of a firewall and CDN in one, it blocks malicious requests and serves cached versions of your blog/site/resources.

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Hi!

I’m a 34-year old software engineer from The Netherlands. My interests lie with (web)development, databases, design patterns, social media, communities, APIs and open data.

More about me, including links to other online services, can be found at gerben.dev