About me

My name is Jang. I was born in the South part of Netherlands and now live in the North part of Amsterdam, with my wife, a cat, lots of books and various musical instruments.

I have studied Physics, Psychology and Philosophy before embarking on a fast-track career in the international supercomputer industry. Creating high-level designs, writing manuals, developing course materials. Also flying around the planet to deliver presentations and courses to customers in various universities and technical research centres.

In 1994 I started my own business as consultant and trainer in the field of technical documentation. When I got bored with writing manuals I got into scripting and then programming to automate tedious tasks. With my background in Philosophy and experience as technical author, I developed various solutions for real-life problems in my business domain.

In the past decade, my focus has shifted somewhat to more generic presentation of content - not just manuals or courses. I love challenges and will always approach a request with a search for the underlying problems, looking for solutions that bring added value to your company.

Approach to coding

I am not using a so-called stack, as I do not want to become dependent on a specific framework. I have done work in the past that became worthless when the supplier of the stack - or one of its components - decided to change some specs, meaning a ton of intricate changes were required to make it all work again.

Most of my current solutions are web-based, using the Apache web server, arguably the most stable open source package available. The package also comes with a MySQL database - which many of my solutions to not even need.

Most of my code is in PHP and Javascript. In some cases I use XSLT - when the data is stored in some kind of XML format. In all cases I refrain from using very advanced features that might be hard to understand or not available on your own servers.

In general, my solutions will run on your own server and not require any internet access other than the usual web access, which is handled by the Apache server. In case additional security is needed, this can be added without changing my code.

The code I write is clear and understandable, so you will have no problem doing the maintenance yourself, or find a developer who can easily see where changes need to be made. I am not at all looking for customer dependencies and neither should you.