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.
Very Active
Publishes multiple times per week
4
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English
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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...
Why Parenting Is Similar To JavaScript Development
Here’s a crazy thought: to me, parenting feels very similar to programming in JavaScript. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am. If you’re an old fart that’s been coding stuff in JavaScript since its inception, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with Douglas Crockford’s bibles, or to be more precise, that one tiny booklet from 2008 JavaScript: The Good Parts. That book covered by a cute O’Reilly butterfly is only 172 pages long. Contrast that with any...
A Note on File History in Emacs
Once you start digging beyond the surface, you discover that an ancient piece of text editing software called Emacs was light years ahead of its time. It already contained a clipboard history (kill-ring) and automatic saves/backups decades before contemporary editors took a half-baked stab at mimicking these features. Granted, I don’t make use of the kill ring because Alfred manages that for me across different applications, but it’s still pretty damn impressive. If you manage to stu...
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