i’m a 23-year-old (almost 24, unfortunately) full-stack software engineer and university student from the netherlands. around here, i’m responsible for the machinery hiding behind the reserve: this website, the bots quietly holding everything together, our systems, and all the other technical bits nobody is supposed to notice until one of them catches fire.
most of what i build is supposed to be invisible. if you’ve never stopped to wonder how a nest knows what to roll, how our systems remember everything, or how we keep track of you being naughty without maintaining a three-thousand-page handwritten ledger, then i’m doing my job correctly.
please continue not thinking about it.
i code just about anywhere to be honest.
what i actually do here
i write code. a deeply unreasonable amount of code.
i give the reserve features nobody asked for but suddenly cannot live without.
i turn “one small change” into an entirely new system.
i break things occasionallyfor science.
i fix them before anyone notices. most of the time.
i stare at error messages until one of us admits defeat. (still usually me.)
i keep everything quietly running behind the scenes so the rest of you can concentrate on being dinosaurs.
most things i change eventually find their way onto the changelog so if you’re ever curious about what i’ve been doing, you can check there instead of taking my word for it.
the word “eventually” is carrying a considerable amount of responsibility in that sentence.
when i’m not fighting the machinery
away from the keyboard, i spend quite a bit of time lifting and working out. i willingly pick up heavy objects (in the gym) put them back exactly where i found them, and repeat this process several times a week while convincing myself that it is an excellent use of my free time.
somehow, it is.
i also travel whenever i can get away with it. i don’t have particularly strong opinions about airports themselves, but put me in another country for approximately twelve minutes and i will have developed several opinions about how they organise things, what they somehow do better than the netherlands, what they do significantly worse, and why absolutely nobody consulted me before designing their public transport system.
i travel. a lot…
these opinions are rarely requested, but that has never really been a requirement.
i share my desk with banjer, my labradoodle pup and unofficial senior supervisor. he has absolutely no opinions about what i’m working on, but extremely strong opinions about how long i’ve been sitting there, whether i should be paying attention to him instead, and when it is time for me to stop.
my labradoodle pup, Banjer.
his management style mostly consists of grabbing my arm with his paws and staring at me until i comply. it is surprisingly effective.
i also have a habit of speaking before i think. pretty much permanently. it’s a wonderful quality in a friend and a slightly less wonderful quality when you’re trying to maintain any illusion of professionalism.
on the bright side, you’ll pretty much always know exactly where you stand with me. occasionally before i do.
if you need me
i’m usually around during the evenings, central european time. if something suddenly has a shiny new feature today, that is probably why.
if the website or one of the bots is behaving strangely, it is probably my fault. if it definitely isn’t my fault, i would still like to know so i can lovingly make it my problem.
if something looks broken, behaves strangely, explodes, disappears, duplicates itself, develops sentience, or simply makes you think, “i don’t think it’s supposed to do that,” please open a ticket on discord.
bug reports are much nicer than discovering three weeks later that everyone quietly accepted a broken button as part of the website’s personality, or that one of the bots has been having a very public crisis.
i would much rather hear about the same problem twice than not hear about it at all.
and if you managed to break something on purpose, i want two things: a high five and a painfully detailed explanation of exactly what you did to break my shit so i can methodically figure out what went wrong and fix it.
breaking things is acceptable. breaking things and refusing to tell me how you did it is where i draw the line.
Rosa Staff
What people have said
Papa you cooked
Everyone bow down to the lord of code ✨
dont eat this guy the world would end if we did
I still think we should eat this guy. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
this guy rocks!!!!!!!
The bot goat (and also #1 fan of white girl music) has risen :O