Writings

Vandaag ga ik met iets nieuws op deze website beginnen: een post series in het Nederlands waarin ik over mijn ervaring met leren van het Nederlands schrijf. Vergelijkbaar met mijn “Recently” series, ga ik een post per maand schrijven. Dat is niet te veel, maar ik hoop dat genoeg is om met mijn Nederlands te helpen verbeteren.

Last year, Chris and I visited Aachen’s Christmas market and I wrote a bit about it. In the article, I mentioned I was looking forward to similar adventures. Well, it has happened! Last weekend, we went to Köln to visit some of its Christmas markets, and it was amazing!

November is almost gone. It was quite of a slow month, so I had more time to spend working on this website, or in watching series - maybe too many. Let’s dive into it.

James shared his Spotify Wrapped and prompted others to do the same. Usually, I would wait for the beginning of January to also collect my Last.fm data, but I can do that later and still include Spotify’s information there.

Since a few months ago, my website has a dark theme. So today I decided to casually open a PR to the darktheme.club website. On this PR, it is asked what mechanism is used to enable the dark mode. I selected JavaScript. It is unfortunate, but it is a reality.

Learning a new language is interesting. There are new words. New structures. New verbs. New adjectives. New ways of explaining things. New ways of categorising things. New ways of describing things. New ways of thinking.

For some, it may come as a surprise that my website’s source code is not open-source. That hasn’t, however, always been the case. Before I fully switching to my custom CMS - named Eagle -, it did use to be open-source.

During the past week and a half, I have been slowly, but surely, doing some cleanup of my GitHub repositories. In the process, I finally decided to tick off some of the items from my list, such as using vanity Go import URLs, improving my IndieAuth library, as well as releasing a Micropub package.

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.