Writings

October just passed by. It’s now full-on autumn and I just turned one year older. It was, overall, a great month. Friends have visited, both from abroad and local. Met with some people, steam train rides. Let’s dive into it!

Learning a new language is though. It is certainly easier for some than for others and there are countless of variables that will change your experience. For the past three years, I have been learning Dutch, which has been quite of a rollercoaster.

My first full year mark working full time just passed by, and so did my first year working full time remotely. Since this is my first actual job, I can’t really compare it with working in-person. Nevertheless, I want to share my experience, as well as some of the things I think might be the pros and the cons.

Back in March, I joined a gym for the first time. My goal was to be able to overcome some issues I was having, as well as start consistently going to the gym. So I choose to work with a personal trainer to “force” me to go every week, and think of what exercises I have to do. That has worked out well, and I’m quite happy.

I have recently acquired a new - and my first - electric bike from Gazelle, a “staple” Dutch brand, and it is powered by a Bosch motor. Bosch has made this app, eBike Flow, which allows you to connect to the bike and use it to track your complete bike ride. In this article, I am going to go over some of the issues I have had and how I have been trying to solve them.

September passed by quite quickly and with that two thirds of 2023 are now finished. As we now enter the final 🏁 quarter of this year, let’s recap what has happened on my life over the past month. As usual, I feel like a lot has happened, especially when looking at it in retrospective.

August is almost gone, and with it the smells of summer. Day after day, the vibes I get from the weather are more autumny 🍁. Temperatures are finally going slightly down and it’s starting to feel more cozy. It’s been a long, yet satisfying month!

Since June, I have had a “about well-knowns” note in my drafts to write an article about. Unfortunately, I haven’t been writing much the last month or two. However, two days ago, Tim wrote about his own experience with well-known links. That prompted me to finish this article!

July is now coming to an end, and so is summer in The Netherlands per the looks of it. It has been raining for two or three weeks already, and the prediction is that it’ll continue over during this week. This, of course, after a few days of what I would consider unusually high temperatures in The Netherlands. Let’s recap this month.

Some time ago, I wrote an article where I essentially complained and layed out the issues I have had with the Dutch digital identification (DigiD) system as a foreigner. In the meanwhile, there have been a few minor updates, and some other things that changed in my understanding. Hence, this new article.

June was a reasonably packed month: some times more eventful than others, but that’s how it always is. Let’s make a small recap of what has happened lately.

I wanted to write an article and, even though I have a list of drafts and ideas about things I want to write, I thought: hmm, I would like to do something more fun. That reminded me of the article I wrote about fractal snowflakes and how to generate them, which gave me an idea 💡!

Today I bring something not as conventional: a post about certain elements of my website you could say that are inspired or borrowed from other websites. Things that I found fascinating and included in my website too over the time. Let’s go!

This is just a quick post to alert that I have changed my PGP key. It doesn’t receive much use, but in the eventuality that someone may want to send me something potentially encrypted, I think it’s reasonably good to keep the record that I updated the key at some point. The contact page has been updated accordingly.

In April, I squeezed into my monthly article that I had come back to Hugo. However, I did not give much context about it. And to continue the “farewell” post saga, here it is. Why did I move back to Hugo? What caused that decision, and how hard was it?