Alextreme.org

Hi, I'm Alex, welcome to my little place on the net! I currently run my own software company (Aperte), and in my few hours of spare time I have been known to mingle in a few little free/open source projects. In 2006 I graduated in AI (MSc) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in 2008 I graduated in Computer Science (MSc).

(cue old ugly foto from Debconf 2004)

Alextreme.org is a typical blog about my life: what I ate for dinner last night (lasagna), how many cups of coffee I drink to wake up (3+) and what kind of weather it is today (sunny, 25C). It also contains projects I'm working on, my opinions and thoughts and an occasional tutorial.

The first version of this page was a near-direct copy of my advogato page.

Bio:

I was born in May '82 in Hoofddorp, son of a primary-school gymnastics teacher and a consultant/security/computer professional. In 1984, we emigrated to New Zealand, and lived for about 9 years in various locations in Auckland. 2 years old, and I'd seen the world! In 1993, we returned to the Netherlands and I've lived there ever since. My childhood has been relatively uneventful, I was a kid always preferring the security of his own little PC over the chaotic, crazy outside world. A little problem solver, I was until my late teens always fond of math and logic puzzles. A creator, I've always been someone who prefers to make order out of chaos.

From high school, I went to the HBO Computer Sciences in Amsterdam. I severely underestimated myself, or overestimated that school, because I quickly found myself in the position of ace-it-all. It was quite practical and I have had a lot of useful experiences from my two years there, but I was overpowered and under fueled.

In the second year, I also enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Artificial Intelligence. Why AI? I humbly must admit that I only had a vague idea about it when I started it. For all I know, it could have been Physics, or Philosophy (I seriously considered those and other options). It was one of those turning points in life, although I only slowly recognized it. It has been an interesting gamble, and AI has held me captive more and more. Not to say I don't like coding, I follow nearly all CS courses, hopping around at leisure. CS is interesting, but I am passionate about AI, more for its diversity and impossible goals than anything else.

Computing

My first computer experiences when I was barely a few years old were with the first Macintosh:
, the first consumer computer with a GUI. I grew up in a world of 300x240 graphics, wordprocessing, dragging your floppy to the trash and, naturally, plenty of computer games. Reckon I was about 7 when I discovered zBasic which I did tinker quite a bit in, but never could get to the fancy graphics of the Mac. From that time onward, I've always been judging programming languages by their toolkits: If it didn't allow me to make pretty UI's, I wouldn't like it. Okay, that's an exageration as I mostly work from consoles, terminals and emacs these days. Dad did introduce me to Pascal, which probably was a bit too complicated for me at that time. Never did like Pascal, sorry dad :-)

What I had been playing around with was Hypercard, a great low-barrier way to get into programming. Apple has since discontinued it (a number of times), but looking back it was HTML plus a bit of flash in an era where Win3.1 only just was released. Only problem was that it wasn't networked. Apple never was that into networking. Pity.

But this was all a very long time ago. At the moment I'm a typical Linux user/developer and into C, Python and Django. Morphix is a project I founded in early 2003 and still has a small community around it. All in all, I do what I think is interesting and always enjoy a good challenge.

cheers from a happy hacker!

Alex