About
Hello, my name is Ariejan de Vroom and I’m a 27 year old Ruby on Rails developer at Kabisa. I live in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, together with my significant other, Laura Oerlemans, and our rabbit Jules.
I have been developing all kinds of things since he age of 13 (I’m 26 now). I started out with GW-BASIC on my (and very much, others’) PC’s. I soon learned that BASIC sucks, and moved on to Turbo Pascal (and later Delphi).
After graduating high school I went to Eindhoven University of Technology, where I studied computer science for a year and a bit. However, I didn’t like it very much. The ratio between studying and actually developing things was just way off for me. After I switched to “Fontys Hogescholen”, I learned Java, and I didn’t like it. Although Java could do a lot more than Delphi could, it still had the feel of a big machine that I needed to steer (with great effort) into the direction I wanted it to go.
I had already been busy writing simple HTML sites since high school, but I soon found out about a language called PHP. At the time, version 4.0 was just released and I took a look. This was a language I liked. Simple to learn, quite powerful and not as slow as Java. I didn’t even have to compile anything, which was new for me. So, I started developing in PHP. After a long period of doubt, this resulted in the purchase of Ariejan.net.
Since then a lot has changed. I put up WordPress on Ariejan.net to keep a blog. In the early days, I didn’t have much to say. Later on, I lost my data a few times (yes, I know). Now, Ariejan.net has been running for almost a year.
During the fall of 2005 I found out that PHP sucked. I had to worry about a lot of stuff like security issues with the sites I built. Even worse, I found myself writing the same boring old code over and over again. This is when I discovered a new and shiny web development tool named Ruby on Rails.
As so many other developers, I fell in love with Rails. First with Rails, of course, and then with Ruby. I started working with Rails almost exclusively and thought it would be a great idea to do my final college project in Rails as well. This I did, and the people at Fontys were surprised by the elegance and beauty of Rails (and my use of it, of course) and I graduated with top marks.
With my degree, I started looking for a job, and found the guys from Kabisa. Kabisa is a small start-up by two experienced Java developers, Harm and Ralph, who saw the Rails-light. Since august 2007 I’ve been working at Kabisa and I’ve been given the opportunity to work with Rails every day. Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute back to the community that of which I’ve been allowed to learn from so much over the past 13 years.
Ariejan.net is an effort to share and spread my knowledge about web development (and especially the use of Ruby on Rails and Subversion). If you’ve been reading my articles, please post a comment or link to my site to show your appreciation.
