Who am I

My name is Louis Nagtegaal and since about 1997 I am a professional web developer. Before that I studied Dutch and Computational linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, in the last I graduated to doctorandus (a beautiful term from the old Dutch education system, which is now replaced by the global much more terms 'bachelor' and 'master'). After my graduation I became a beursaal (another now extinct term) at the Institute for Logic Language and Computation and did 4 years of PhD research into the field of concept formation and neural networks.

At the end of the four year period I needed a job and became webdeveloper at Waxtrapp. There I build a large number of websites for municipalities, broadcast companies and some commercial parties.

After a few years I needed a change and after a couple of short adventures into Java and .Net C# I ended up at Triquanta and got to know Drupal, in those days mostly Drupal 7 and maybe 1 or 2 Drupal 6 sites.

Because had always been much more into languages like C, C++ etc, I always had the feeling that programming in PHP was a bit of a mess. No real types, no or almost none object-oriented code. But then luckily Drupal 8 came out and now I have the feeling again that I am really programming like it should be. 

And lately interesting developments like headless and front ends like ReactJS make programming even more fun!

This site was build inn ReactJS with a Drupal 8 backend. Of course this is a bit of overkill for such a simple site, in which the content is still a bit meager, to say the least. But the main purpose was to learn things, and I know I still have to learn a lot, but that is exactly what makes webdevelopment so interesting.  

About this site

I am n o designer and had to come up with a way to present the navigation. I decided that I wanted something which looked a bit like a tag cloud (you do remember tag clouds I hope?) and to distribute the items over the page I feed the create timestamp to a sine and cosine function, and so the positions are dependent on the date the blog was written. Alas this is not the first site the blogs are published, and I was not totally sure anymore when each one was written and just made an educated guess.

The home button is positioned using my birthday, so I will expect birthday cards from all you wizkids out there on the correct date.

Just for the fun of it I created a REST-endpoint in Drupal which is used by ReactJS to fetch fragments of the blog and show them in a number of colors and fonts. Once again, this is nothing useful, but is was fun to make.