Brain Baking
Wouter Groeneveld — Teacher, programmer, and researcher in Belgium
Wouter Groeneveld on software craft, philosophy, and retro computing.
brainbaking.comWouter Groeneveld's wide-ranging personal blog mixes software craft with philosophy, retro gaming, board games, and actual bread baking. He's a teacher, programmer, and researcher in Belgium who writes with the curiosity of someone who refuses to stay in one lane. The blog feels like a warm, nerdy conversation that jumps between Emacs configuration and the meaning of life.
Written by Wouter Groeneveld since 2017.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
4
Independent Blog
English
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Favourites of February 2026
A sudden burst of Japanese cherry flowers sparkling in the sun brings much-needed lightheartedness into our late February lives. Before we know it, the garden will be littered with these little pink petals, and the very short blossom season will be behind us. Our cherry tree always had the tendency of being early, eager, and then running out of steam. It’s weird to have temperatures reach almost twenty degrees Celsius while a few weeks ago it was still freezing. No wonder the tree is confu...
An Album For Every Year Of My Life
Inspired by Tom’s One Album for Every Year of Life compilation, Robert created his own list. It’s been a while since I last published a list related to music so here’s my own that should contain 40 items. This was a much more challenging exercise than I initially thought. It took me almost an entire day to compile the list and it still contains holes. In any case, scrolling through the list is another way to reveal the evolution of my musical taste. Each row includes a sample t...
Managing Multiple Development Ecosystem Installs
In the past year, I occasionally required another Java Development Kit besides the usual one defined in $JAVA_HOME to build certain modules against older versions and certain modules against bleeding edge versions. In the Java world, that’s rather trivial thanks to IntelliJ’s project settings: you can just interactively click through a few panels to install another JDK flavour and get on with your life. The problem starts once you close IntelliJ and want to do some command line work....
Never Blow Up Your Bridges
Ten years ago, I first met my now colleague who then acted as the internship guide for a couple of graduate students that had their first taste of the industry at my previous (previous) employer. We only had brief contact: I was supposed to guide the interns from the industry side, and he was supposed to guide them from the education side. We shook hands and never saw each other again. Until four years later, while I was doing my PhD and ended up in the jury for the Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd,...
A Note On Presenting Code in Emacs
The other day, I decided it was finally time. It was finally time to open Emacs to demonstrate certain code functionalities in class. The result was predictable: it caused further confusion among already confused students. The root cause wasn’t switching out a familiar WebStorm-like environment for an esoteric IDE but rather the way the code was presented. Most classrooms come equipped with crappy projectors that are experts in washing out colours and blurring otherwise perfectly crisp tex...
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