About

I started blogging 20 years ago, and for quite some time I enjoyed writing about a lot of different topics. Some of my posts were well read, and throughout the years the blog got more readers. At some point, the pressure of writing useful things got too high for me. I just ran out of words and didn't write anything for a long time.

Why pick it up now?

Partly because I have created a small (soon to be) open-source project to create and publish blog posts on GitHub Pages. Not because this idea did not exist (there is an excellent version implemented by Michiel Borkent called Quickblog), but because in my free time I have built a decent library of web components, and I wanted to use them in a live service. This blog and the code to generate it is the result of that.

The other reason to start again is because things are moving so fast now in the tech world. To make sense of the world around me it is sometimes useful to slow down and write some thoughts down. I do not pretend to know things better than others, or to be able to make sense of everything. Writing helps me to organize my own thinking, and if that somehow helps you, then that is an extra bonus.

Who am I?

I'm a computer scientist that started learning his craft at university when computers were expensive and shared, not personal (end of the eighties). I got my PhD and went to a tech lab of the largest Telecom provider in the Netherlands. Funny enough I learned and used Common Lisp there.

From there I ended up going into managing teams and as they became larger, I crawled up the management ladder as well. At some point I realized I liked building things more than playing the corporate game and I left for my first startup. Now, some 20 years later with both successful and failed businesses, I am still in the tech world, both as a developer (mostly Clojurescript/Reframe/React) and as a CEO of a small Clojure based company I once started with my friend Jeroen van Dijk.

Personal projects

In my free time I thought a lot about the complexity of building client and server state applications I have to deal with daily. At some point I came across web components. The idea of making clients simpler and smaller with web components was attractive and I have created several personal projects around web components, including a large web component library.

Although web components have several advantages, they aren't easy in use. And they do not necessarily resolve the complexity issue I was thinking about. This led to several other small projects to tackle complexity. One is a Clojurescript runtime (called BareBuild) that lets you create server-state web applications (data over the wire instead of htmx). And another project aims to tackle some of the main issues with web components that are usually tackled in a framework. It basically lets you control state while BareMirror takes care of rendering. It's much smaller than a framework, and it makes the use of web components easier and more efficient.

You can find my efforts, all open source, at my GitHub projects

The blog

I'm not sure what the blog will be about yet. It will touch on LLMs, the things I create or think about creating, and things I wonder about in our tech world.

Why the name you ask?

Foggy Glasses is a metaphor for a thing I often struggle with as a person needing glasses to see. Once fogged they rob you of a clear view. And in that moment, when things are unclear, new thoughts often appear, almost like the colours of a rainbow. So here is my new attempt. I'll just see where it takes me, and if you enjoy reading it that is awesome!