Programming

I love programming because it lets me think in different “dialects” of logic, from low‑level systems work to high‑level application design. 

My journey started in the 1980s at Dutch Telecom, writing assembler, C, and Pascal close enough to the hardware that every instruction counted. 

When object‑oriented programming emerged as the new paradigm, I moved naturally into C++, fascinated by the idea that code could model the real world in classes and objects. I still remember a moment in the 1990s at Mendez Ganz Bank in Amsterdam, when a colleague demoed something completely new: Java applets. It felt like a glimpse of the future, and it turned out to be the beginning of what would become one of the world’s most widely used programming languages. 

To this day I still write C++ when performance and memory management really matter, because those projects always remind me how computers actually work under the hood.

Later, after emigrating to Switzerland, I shifted into TIBCO middleware and Java, and eventually into the Spring ecosystem. Java with Spring lets me design robust, structured services with clear boundaries and powerful frameworks that make complex backends feel elegant instead of overwhelming and it helps that so many companies now standardize on this stack. For the frontend, I usually work with Angular, Vue, or React to build responsive, modern user interfaces

Python plays a completely different role in my programming life. it’s my go‑to language for rapid prototypes, automation, and experimentation, and I like it even more because it’s the scripting language behind my favorite 3D modeling tool, Blender. 

I also enjoy building apps for macOS, iPad, and iPhone using the “old” Objective‑C(++) and the more modern, functional‑style Swift in combination with SwiftUI. Check out my app "Happy Artists" on the Apple Store where you can see some of my Artwork.

“Keep learning” is my motto, so almost every day I’m experimenting with new programming technologies, containers, orchestration, cloud platforms, and whatever else appears on the horizon simply because I love software development and the endless possibilities it keeps opening up.

Containerization

Docker, Compose & Swarm

Redhat Openshift & SUSE Rancher KubernetesWrite Here...

Write Here...Ansible is my favorite Infrastructure as Code tool because it combines power with an unusually clean, readable approach. 

Using simple YAML playbooks, you can describe complex server configurations and workflows in a way that feels almost like writing down intentions rather than programming them. 

I created an ansible project with a simple playbook for my AI Chatbot example in my new book "Docker under the Hood", Its agentless design connecting over SSH or WinRM means you don’t have to install or maintain extra daemons on your hosts, yet you still get idempotent, repeatable runs that keep environments consistent from laptop to lab to production. 

The huge ecosystem of modules and roles lets you automate everything from basic package installs to full Kubernetes clusters, while still staying close to plain text and version control. 

For anyone who values clarity, auditability, and automation that doesn’t fight you, Ansible is a natural fit

Kubernetes is my favorite container platform because it turns a messy collection of containers into a coherent, self‑healing system. 

Instead of thinking about individual machines, you describe the desired state of your applications how many replicas, what resources they need, how they’re exposed and Kubernetes continuously works in the background to make reality match that intent. 

Its primitives like Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and Ingress give you fine‑grained control over rollout strategies, traffic routing, and configuration without hard‑wiring that logic into your apps. 

At the same time, its powerful scheduling, autoscaling, and health‑checking capabilities make it possible to survive node failures and traffic spikes with far less manual intervention. 

Once you get comfortable with its model, Kubernetes feels less like a tool and more like a programmable cluster operating system for everything you run in containers.

If you don't want to start with Kubernetes directly Docker Swarm is a great alternative to learn and understand the world of images and containers.

(Game) Development & 3D Modeling

I love starting in Blender 3D, sculpting raw ideas into detailed 3D Models, obsessing over topology, lighting, and materials until they feel alive. From there, dropping those assets into Unity or Unreal is like opening a portal, suddenly the static meshes become part of a living world, responding to physics, lighting, and player interaction. 

I really enjoy the whole pipeline blocking out levels, placing my Blender 3D model creations in scenes, wiring up interactions, and seeing a blank gray space slowly turn into a rich, explorable environment also because of the amazing landscape editors Unreal and Unity have.

The loop of modeling, importing, iterating, and polishing is what keeps me hooked. Every asset is a small piece of a larger world I’m building from scratch.

In the video on the left side I created "Princess Dahlia's world" in Unity 3D where I modeled a complete landscape with water meshes, sky boxes, weather/climate assets and many other. I created all the character animation and programmed the AI for all the NPC's to walk through the landscape. 

I used Microsoft C# as "scripting" language in Unity....

App Development

I love to create apps for iPhone, iPad, and macOS with Apple's functional programming language Swift and his declarative UI Biuilder Swift UI. 

Working with Swift and SwiftUI is a good approach and a lot of fun because you get both a modern language and a modern way of thinking about user interfaces. Swift is fast, expressive, and safe, so you spend less time fighting crashes and weird memory bugs and more time shaping how your app should behave. 

SwiftUI then layers a declarative UI model on top of that, instead of micromanaging view controllers and constraints, you describe what the interface should look like for a given state, and the framework figures out how to render and update it. That makes your code shorter, more readable, and easier to change. 

Features like live previews in Xcode turn UI work into an interactive playground where you see design changes instantly, which feels very rewarding. You see your App growing during development and that's so cool.

And because SwiftUI runs across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, and Apple TV with one codebase, you can reuse your ideas everywhere. The combination of clear Swift code, reactive state management, and instant visual feedback makes building apps feel less like plumbing and more like creative exploration—which is why it’s both productive and genuinely fun to use.

My Happy Artists app is a good example of this approach: I built it in Swift and SwiftUI with a focus on a clean, expressive UI that feels at home on every Apple device. After polishing the experience and making sure it ran smoothly on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I released Happy Artists on the Apple Store as a free download so anyone can try it and enjoy creating without barriere