Pretty site huh? You'll know why by reading 'About this site' at the bottom of this page.
I am Jur de Vries, an independent software developer and musician/artist. That makes me a coding artist.
At the moment I am working on a performance where light and music form an intimate bond. Read about it on the Photonic Orchestra site!
I believe that craftsmanship in any profession starts with a deep understanding of the subject. Apart from that I think best results in a profession can be achieved by studying other disciplines as well. Although not logical at first sight, my education in cello helped me to be a better coder: for instance, the discipline to practice every day and the need to try out different interpretations are also highly beneficial when coding.
Mastering different coding languages helps to be more creative in finding solutions. The knowledge of several programming paradigms (OO, functional, procedural) is necessary to solve problems.
While reading the above, one might think that I advocate a broad but shallow view. That's not the case. I believe that whatever you're doing, you should always strive for expert level craftsmanship.
For 7 years I have been co-owner of a Drupal company, Triquanta. I was the technical director and Drupal backend expert and created backend systems for small to medium sized sites. In many projects I integrated the search engine Apache Solr. I also implemented Devops using Ansible for server provisioning and Jenkins for Continuous integration. As an active member of the Drupal community, I initiated the Drupal Tech Talks in the Netherlands. I have been training developers to learn Drupal site building, Drupal backend development and Apache Solr.
After working for a year as Drupal 8 developer and team lead at a big media company creating big American sites, I shifted to javascript and React Native in order to gain knowledge of App Development. In accordance with my conviction, I first studied Javascript and the background of Javascript extensively, so I could understand the underlying concepts first before applying those in React Native using ES6. The backend of the apps I have made were created in Django (python) and deployed using Docker.
For this site I choose to use Wagtail as the cms, as it is based on the Django framework. It has been deployed using Docker containers.
In the past 15 years I created Photonic Cello, an advanced system to control light using sound. It was build using Max4Live and custom code in Java. I recently started the rewrite of the system in Cinder, which is a creative coding framework written in C++. I created a fully functional easy to use (for me) program for controlling real lights and virtual lights in the Unity game engine.
I started learning Unity to be able to create virtual reality experiences using the HTC Vive.
Email: info [at] thecodingartist [dot] nl
Phone: +31 6 3383 2320
As real understanding of a subject starts from base knowledge, I am convinced that the creation of a web site starts with the content. That's why I've decided to create my personal site in stages, starting from a one page html file without any styling or scripting to a fully decoupled site using a content management system. At this moment the version of the site is 3.0. The CMS used is Wagtail.
Version 1.0 was the most basic form: just one html page without styling. In version 2 styling was added, using Gulp en bourbon.
The code for this site can be found on Github