Welcome and thanks for visiting my humble place on the internet.
Here you can find my projects, blog and information about me. In the future I will also host fun projects to try out here.
About me
I'm Ian Wijma from The Netherlands, and currently living in Canberra, Australia. I moved to Australia in 2019.
Passions
Programming
This is my hobby and my profession. In my spare time I love trying out new and exciting new languages like GO, Rust, Deno and C#. Where at work I mainly use JavaScript with sprinkles of PHP.
Craft beer
I love trying out new craft beer from local and international brewers. Any new location has its own brewers with their beers to try out. I'm also starting to read into brewing my own beers. So stay tuned about potential blog posts about that.
Traveling
I love traveling, about 7 years ago, when I was still living in The Netherlands, I always went to France. But ever since I went to Dublin and Scotland I got the travel fever. Countries I'd love to visit are Japan, India, Russia and Canada. I also want to travel around Europe more, visit friend from Sweden, Denmark and England.
Gaming
Gaming for me is a way to wind down my head after a busy day of programming. Where after I feel relaxed and ready to get some good sleep.
FOSS
Free Open Source Software is great, I always look at project to contribute to. During a busy work week I don't get much time to do so. But during my holidays I love checking out projects that I can start or help.
Communication
I consider myself to have good communication skills, and I love meeting new people of different backgrounds. I have many friends from all over the world as I mentioned before. Where I love seeing differences between different parts of the world.
Teamwork
Teamwork is very important for me and love practising it. Teamwork to me is obvious working in a team, as a group who understands each others standpoint and view. I also have lots of experience working and interactive with people from different origins, due to the fact that I have friends all over the worlds which I have met up with.
Project/Product focused
I'm because of my works very product focused, and love to know the scope of the whole product so decisions are easy to make. Were I often know the actual code from the top of my head.
Programming
I consider myself very capable in programming. I'm not focused on one language which makes it relatively easy for me to pickup a new language. I learn myself programming concepts instead the language.
Saying this I find myself skilled in JavaScript because I have been programming with this languages over a decade and a half as a hobby, and since 2015 professionally.
This allows me to know various gotchas, like shrinking an array in JavaScript can be done via setting the array.length = 5;
Linux
I love Linux and I have been using it personally for since 2008 and professionally for since 2015. Where since beginning 2019 I personally run fully on Linux, where I migrated my gaming PC to POP!_OS 20.04. I also have experience running Linux server. Where Debian/Ubuntu has my preference, but I'm always curious for the next big thing!
Product development
I have worked for since 2015 on developing products in SAAS environments, Where I have worked on products ranging from HRM solutions to internal social systems for companies to eCommerce with multi channel support.
With the latter one I have 3+ years experience, I have worked on multi channel support ranging from webshop integration to an in-store POS system. My role here was everything from backend to frontend to sysops.
Workaholic
Yep, This is not a skill I'm proud of, But once I'm going on a project I'm excited for I sometimes work long hours. In my current job I used to make easily 12+ hours days for a week long.
Now I have stopped doing such a long hours due to pay, I still see myself work for hours on personal projects.
Atlassian 2024 - present
As a Software Engineer I found myself excelling at my job. I was put early on a high stakes project that involved improving the performance for XL enterprice customers at Atlassian. My day-to-day task is workiPng in large code bases and technologies that are developed in house, which I managed to do and spread information about. I love working on challanging tasks, which enabled me to receive reconision from my managers and peers of various levels.
Maropost 2021 - 2024
As a Tech Lead at Maropost I found myself successfully guiding peers, working out EPICs to a point where teams understood what and why certain changes needed to happen. Additionally I've found myself guiding whole teams from across the business ask for my guidance around topics like feature toggles and the concept behind writing behavioural tests. Besides all of this I also worked myself on spikes and tasks to help the team I worked with to successfully complete sprints.
Australian War Memorial 2021 for 6 months
Co-design & being the sole developer on the online exhibitions like navy.awm.gov.au & awm.gov.au/3dtreasures Design & develop transcription tools for images, video and audio. Create a foundation to easily create online exhibitions for the public.
StoreKeeper B.V. 2015-2020
As a Senior Software developer at StoreKeeper B.V. I build their API first eCommerce SAAS solution. They provide solutions ranging from Webshops for online to POS systems for in the stores. Because it's team was small I worked on everything, ranging from the Backend, Admin panel, Apps, Integrations, POS systems, CI/DC and DevOps. This enabled me to have a broad understanding of everything in a the software development cycle. From creating the initial wireframe mockups, it's design to the deployment and delivery of new and existing systems.
Although I went to a school where I learned to work with hardware and later on learned to program. The periods where too easy and learned mostly from my own projects.
ROC Van Twente (IT support) 2010-2012
IT support was a requirement for me due to my prior education. Here I mainly learned the basics of ITIL and some basic hardware.
This course was easy for me because I already worked on hardware 4 years prior to this study, where I was tinkering around with several 2nd hard desktops and a 1u server.
ROC Van Twente (Programming) 2012-2015
After the IT support study I was ready for a challenge, and was excited to get started with C#. But after a month the pace was slow for myself due to me also playing around with C# at home.
Manager gaming community 2013-2014
Maybe a silly think to include, but I used to be a Manager at a gaming community where I mainly took care of conflicts within the community. But this was on an American server. Where I learned a lot of English speaking and writing.
I stopped managing after the exams began and required some focus, and the timezone difference blocked my of resolving conflicts.