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 8 years as a hobby,
and 5 years 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 7+ years and professionally for 5 years. 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 5 year on developing products in a SAAS environment, 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.
StoreKeeper B.V. 2015-2020
After my game development application was a flop I started working for StoreKeeper B.V. Here I learned allot, but mainly that I need to learn at my own pace. Which school are often slow and won't give me a challenge.
Here I learned professional/technical communication in English due to the fact that the CTO is from Poland. Where we mainly work with JavaScript, PHP and PostGreSQL on an eCommerce product. I learned here to combine hardware and software because we have our own POS system. with a connection to several web shops using a backend and backoffice to manage it all.
Albert Heijn (Dutch grocery store) 2010-2013
I started off with a proper job at the local grocery store, where I learned allot about teamwork, communication and being organised. Where after a few months I mainly worked in the warehouse extracting the truck and organising the warehouse.
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.
Saxion University (Game development) 2015
After I was done with my programming education. I have applied for a game development university where I have programmed my game from scratch as a challenge for myself. But after getting negative advice because my game from scratch was less complete than other peoples drag and drop games. I decided to work for a year. Which turned into my never going back to any university due to the fact I learn way more in the field and personally.
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.