A New Blog: What to Expect?

It has taken me a surprisingly long time to publish my first blog post. You’d say that, as an engineer, I’d be able to spin up a blogging platform in a matter of minutes. While that might be true, I am a perfectionist: I started at least ten blogs to only never finish a single one of them. Until today, that is. Welcome!

My story

Back up to 2012. I just graduated with a Masters degree in Computer Science and moved from The Netherlands across the Atlantic. In Boston, MA, I would start my career as a software engineer at a local start-up I interned with just six months prior, called Kinvey. From here, life has been a bit of a rollercoaster (the good kind):

• 2014: I decide to leave Boston and embark on a six-month backpacking trip through Asia and South America.
• 2015: You can only backpack for so long, and the trip comes to an end. The final flight (with a free upgrade to business class, of course) leaves me in Australia.
• 2015–2016: Melbourne, the most livable city in the world at the time ¹, is my home.
• 2016: Back to Europe it is, where I travel through Scandinavia and Eastern Europe for three months before settling down in London.
• 2017: London was good, but not great. It is time to set down some roots, and for software engineers, the place to be is the United States.

Since 2017, I have been living in New York City, working for a video platform company called JW Player.

The purpose of this blog

The purpose of this blog is two-fold. Most importantly, it is my outlet to share what I stumble upon in daily life. Think how to book luxury travel for cheap, what VPN I use, to what recreational soccer league to pick in New York.

Second, this blog is my portfolio, my online presence as a software engineer. Expect posts to range from how I set-up this blog, to actual coding problems, to topics such as stock options or choosing between your companies PPO or HDHP health care plans.

While I write on a large variety of topics, I by no means have a degree or certificate in any matter (except Computer Science, I know a bit about that), so take everything with a grain of salt.

I might not know everything, but I do have an opinion about it.

At the end of the day, if my blog helps you, inspires you, or excites you, my work is done.