Ruurd
Ruurd

Mar 18, 2014 2 min read

Bio

Who I am

A quantumphysics PhD disguised as developer.

What I do

I work at ITQ making awesome stuff. Years ago, a close friend jokingly remarked ‘every smart person ends up in IT at some point’. I shrugged it off at the time, but here I am.

Why I do it

While I studied physics, and started a career in it, I always coded. In fact, when my dad brought home a Compaq ‘portable’ - it weighed >10kg and had no battery - I was sold.

My first coding machineMy first coding machine

When I didn’t play Monkey Island, Civilization and Populous, I learned myself how to program in Turbo Pascal and plain C using a worn 2nd hand Kernighan & Ritchie at age 12.

Still the best plain C introStill the best plain C intro

Over the years I dabbled in x86 assembly (<256 byte snake, U+V pipeline maximum optimized Mandelbrot routine in the last manually optimizable CPU, the Pentium 1), inspired by Game Developer magazine and my all time coding hero Michael Abrash who is now at Valve (remember his Zen of Assembly language) and for my study and work I used C++, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, LabView and more.

This baby contained the Zen of Assembly language, still an awesome readThis baby contained the Zen of Assembly language, still an awesome read

When eventually the physics ecosystem wound me down and I had my PhD, I decided to leave superconductivity and cleanrooms for others and started my own enterprise coding a MMO browser game in Java. One of my childhood dreams was to make a game someday, and this was a chance. It failed on the money front, but I learned web development as a side effect.

More than 20 years after my first Hello World I’m still developing, and making the world cloud native.