Category: Blogging

Posts about blogging, or this particular blog itself.

What have you done for me lately? (Aug 2025)

Jeroen

After the editions from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024, here is yet another recap blogpost showcasing recent projects and updates you can find online from my hand. This past year and a half has been a bit slower (online) than usual, but there are still some noteworthy things.

Presentations & Sketch Noting

I’ve been on stage at local meetups twice in the past period:

Here are the Sketch Notes I made for the latter presentation:

Sketch notes drawing a path through the terms "Small Talk, Being Evil, Undercover, Inbox Management, Persuasion, 2D List Making, Stress Management, Mentoring, Empathy, Small Talk" into a conclusion "Honing Secondary Skills is Most Effective".

In general I did a ton of sketch noting, usually posting them in a thread on Social Media:

Advent of Code

Like most years before, I shared my Advent of Code projects:

Blog posts

Again I did not write many posts on this blog, but I did write two for my current employer:

  • June 2025: a (Dutch) post with a recap from Joy of Coding 2025.
  • Juli 2024: a (Dutch) post detailing my and Infi’s view (from back then) on AI and LLM usage.

What’s Next?

Well, to a degree, family will be first for the coming months. Plenty of time to be spent there. Depending on how much time is left I might finally put some work into making Tierdom an actual platform, but we’ll see if I can get to it.

Stay tuned! I’m sure to share the recap of all projects in one or two years from now.

What have you done for me lately? (Apr 2024)

Jeroen

Seems like it’s becoming a tradition to fill this blog mostly with roughly yearly recaps (see 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2023). And you know what? I’m good with that! So, without further ado, let’s dive into recent projects!

Pincrediball

Let’s start with the biggest project of the year! In my eight-week sabbatical I decided to learn how to design, build, and publish a full game. And I got there in the end!

Here are all the interesting resources to have a look at:

It’s not the best game in the world, but I am extremely proud that I created and published a game without any prior experience in the field (outside programming business line applications of course).

Tierdom

Another pretty big project in 2023 was “Tierdom“: a web application where you can show a ranked list of things you’ve enjoyed. Games, books, movies, … you name it! It’s here to solve a particular gripe with platforms like IMDB or BoardGameGeek or similar: those platforms are great but they might rug-pull at any time they please. With Tierdom, you own your own words and ratings!

Here’s a quick screenshot:

Screenshot with a blurry tier list in the background, and a modal dialog praising "Commander Keen" as an "S-tier" game

And here are the main links at the moment:

I’m still planning on turning this into an online service of some kind, to let others benefit as well. Stay tuned!

Blog posts

Although I didn’t write on this blog, as mentioned above I did write a ton of posts on the Pincrediball devlog. A whopping 39 blog posts in total!! So no wonder I didn’t feel like writing much more here.

Oh, and here are some posts I wrote for my employer’s blog:

  • January 2024: a (Dutch) post congratulating the winners of the Infi Advent of Code 2023 puzzle.
  • July 2023: a (Dutch) post titled “Hardware! (Part 3: The Rest)“
  • April 2023: a (Dutch) post titled “Hardware! (Part 2: Randapparatuur)“
  • February 2023: a (Dutch) post titled “Hardware! (Part 1: Laptops)“

Advent of Code

Again, a separate section for the yearly programming puzzles challenge. Same three mini-projects as all previous years:

  • My AoC 2023 solutions in TypeScript. No room for learning a new language, but I did use the Deno runtime this year for a change of pace.
  • The AoC 2023 Survey and its Results. The web-based results dashboards is paying off, and I’ve polished and updated it this year to become even better!
  • The AoC Browser Extension got some significant love again, with a bunch of contributions from the community again. A couple of thousand installs so quite a few folks enjoying our work!

What’s next!?

Above is the stuff I’ve been busy with in the past year or so. It’s unclear what’s next, although improving Tierdom is pretty high up the list. I’d recommend staying tuned for the next recap to know how things turned out!

What have you done for me lately? (Feb 2023)

Jeroen

After a few previous editions (January 2019, September 2018, and December 2017) I’m back with another recap of all the things I’ve been doing instead of writing blog posts. Without any ado, let’s dive into stuff I’ve been up to!

Blog posts

Same as last time, although I’ve not been blogging much here on my personal blog (only one post, about my Book List), I have been writing content for my employer’s blog:

Not as many blogposts as previous years, but still a handful!

Advent of Code

The yearly advent calendar of programming puzzles deserves its own section. Three things revolved around this event for me:

Plus I got to craft fresh Egg Nog during Infi’s Meetup around Advent of Code, which is always nice!

Projects

Then there are a handful of full-on side projects:

Sketch notes

I’ve been doing several more (amateur level) sketch notes of Tech Events, here’s a few links to them (on Twitter only, for the moment):

Now that I post those links, thinking about the state of Twitter, I should probably also give my sketch notes a more permanent home where I am in control of the data.

What’s next!?

Those were the things I’ve been doing (instead of blogging) in the recent past. I find that I actually enjoy blogging only once in a while with recaps of all the weird side projects. So, up next, are probably a bunch more side projects!

Plus, I write this post at the start of an 8-week sabbatical. So who knows? Maybe that gives enough room for one or two side-projects!?

What have you done for me lately? (Jan 2019)

Jeroen

Here’s yet another post similar to ones from September 2018 and December 2017: a recap of things I’ve been busy with in stead of writing more blog posts. It includes several blog posts I’ve written (and possibly should’ve cross-posted here?) for my employer: Infi.

One special thing of note is my previous blog post from two years ago, about “Reproman”. I had much energy and a great plan for a grand new project. First, it somehow didn’t “click” for me… and then a pandemic hits. And also my job title changes at the same(ish) time. So that project didn’t go as planned. I can firmly declare it frozen (if not dead) at this point. There, I’ve said it.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into some things that did happen since that last post.

Blog posts

I have not blogged here, on my personal blog, for two years. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing some new content! Let’s start with blog posts I’ve written for my employer’s blog:

Emotionally, it feels right to “restart” the list with all the stuff from “before the pandemic started“:

So no shortage of inspiration for things to write about, as you can see! Just on a different blog, is all.

I will say I’m considering pushing myself to write more frequently here, on my personal blog. But we’ll see.

Projects

In addition to writing for Infi’s blog, I’ve also been busy on a few projects. As always, you can find the more interesting ones on jeroenheijmans.nl, but here’s a couple of highlights:

That’s just a few highlights though, check my homepage for all different projects I’ve been running.

Various

Relevant to how many blog posts I can write, and how many projects I’m able to produce, is of course context. In software development, “it depends” is the standard state of things, right? It makes sense to share a few of the prime influences.

First up, since 2020, I’m not only a Technical Lead at Infi anymore. I’ve also signed up to be part of the management team as CTO of Infi Utrecht. I consider getting management responsibilities a demotion rather than a promotion, yet I feel compelled to spend part of my time making and keeping Infi a place I want to work at.

Second, of course, is the pandemic. In addition to having just about all possible privileges already, in the pandemic I also had no kids, had a great partner, and a relatively stable job. This makes (I presume) things a lot easier to handle. But still, it affected me regardless. I’ve mostly been acknowledging that, and acting accordingly. I hope you all can do so too!

Finally

In conclusion: what’s next!?

Well, I consider writing part of my job. So if you follow me on Twitter you’ll at least see my posts I wrote for Infi circulate. In addition I might write a bit more frequent here too. And if not, I’ll be sure to write another one of these “round up” blogposts in some months or years.

We’ll see.

What have you done for me lately? (Sep 2018)

Jeroen

In December 2017 I wrote a similar post. Over the past few months I’ve been busy with other projects (writing and non-writing), and I’d love to aggregate them all here in a single post.

So, here’s some stuff from the recent past:

Some things that are in progress:

  • 2018-09-xx: Part 2 of the “Auth0 and Angular 6” blog series is forthcoming on infi.nl
  • 2018-09-xx: A status report on my EmpGrid project is in progress

Finally, some stuff I hope to be writing about in the near future:

Stay tuned!

What have you done for me lately? (Dec 2017)

Jeroen

Don’t worry! This is not yet another “I haven’t blogged because…” post. It’s similar though: it’s to aggregate all the cool material I’ve been producing lately instead of writing on my personal blog!

Without further ado, here’s the goodies from the past:

Oh yeah, there’s also some stuff going on in the present:

Finally, here’s some cool stuff I might possibly do in the near future:

  • I’ve worked several months in a Java/Maven/Spring project, which lures me to write about the differences between Java and C#. No promises though!
  • 2018-01-xx: excited to start on a project that uses ClojureScript, hurray for opportunities to learn stuff! Might even write about it, here or on Infi’s blog.
  • 2018-xx-xx: blog post about Top 100 Games is in progress, though no promises here!
  • 2018-xx-xx: a side project that gets sidelined a lot, I still intend to finish EmpGrid some time.

Several things on these lists I want to blog about, but I’m not ready to commit to anything yet. Stay tuned!

New Beginnings

Jeroen

In less than two weeks, I’ll be starting a fresh challenge at Infi. I hope (and think) I will bring things to the table, but I’ve also already noticed that there will be a lot of new things for me to learn. I honestly feel that a large portion of your skills and knowledge can be best gained from other people (online, or in real life, doesn’t matter), which is why I’m very excited about this new beginning!

I’m pretty sure that this fresh start will influence what I’ll be writing about on my blog. I’ve got some ideas, but even more so I think additional concrete ideas will start to flow in the coming months.

But first, before we get to that, there will be (a) a very short vacation, and (b) a short period of silence while I get settled. After that, you can expect the reports to flow in again here. See you then!

WordPress, Rowspan, and Feedly

Jeroen

From my previous blogpost I learned that combining WordPress, the rowspan attribute, and Feedly will result in a Picasso-like rendering of your post. This blog doesn’t have “Meta” in its title, and that’s not for nothing. So let’s examine this beast.

Here’s the markup:

And here is that exact table in this very blog post:

Header 1 Header 2
Top-left cell with rowspan = 2 Top-right cell
Bottom-right cell

This will render just fine in both the WordPress editor, like this:

Table with rowspan

And it will also render just fine in WordPress itself, like this:

Table with rowspan in WordPress

 

You can check out how this rendered in Feedly by visiting the actual website for this blog:

Table rendered in Feedly

Which is ugly, but technically just fine! (It’s only missing or ignoring the full-width css attribute.)

So, what went wrong with my previous post? In case you wouldn’t believe me (but you do, don’t you?!), here’s an annottated rendering of that post in Feedly:

Faulty table rendering

Basically, the green bit should’ve come below the table, but instead it got lumped into the bottom right cell. If I check the rendered html in Feedly using the Chrome dev tools, I can see that it does indeed do this.

I’ve checked in my RSS feed and found the culprit, it’s actually WordPress that renders faulty html: