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Arjen Wiersma

My name is Arjen. I am a Cyber Security Consultant for Scyon. I help organisations with their Application Security, Offensive Security and (Cyber) Business needs. Roles that I like to fulfill: Engineer Manager, Senior Developer (Java), Architect, (C)ISO.

I have been in the software and security industry for almost 30 years and have worked in:

  • Internet providers (Chello / UPC, Tiscali - NL): Java
  • Startups (Personify - USA, eBuddy - NL): Java, Big Data
  • Healthcare and FinTech (Infomedics - NL): Java and dotNet - Managed the IT and Development teams
  • EduTech (NOVI - NL): Managed the development team building in Serverless, Javascript
  • Education (Hogeschool van Amsterdan / NOVI - NL): teaching software security and software engineering courses
  • Cyber Security (Independent): helping organisations with their security posture

I am a member of:

  • NLJUG: The dutch Java user group
  • VERSEN: The dutch association of software engineers
  • OWASP: The OWASP Netherlands chapter

In 2024 I completed my Masters’ Degree. My research topic was BiDE, a language and architecture for the creation of bidirectional diagrammatic editors. In essence a way to modify program text using diagrams and text at the same time, allowing stakeholders of different backgrounds to work on the same system at the same time. I worked on this thesis with Bastiaan Heeren (Open Universiteit) and Jurgen Vinju (Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica).

In my spare time I love to explore the cutting edge of software engineering, exploring new languages such as Rust, Clojure and Golang in combination with Large Language Models and their novel applications.

I toot on the fediverse as @credmp@fosstodon.org and on @arjenwiersma.nl on Blue Sky.

Find my longer form writings in the Writing Category.

The views on this site are my own.

Recent posts

  1. The history of editors (somewhat)

    TLDR: I created an interactive chart of editors, see it in action.

    Today the news dropped that Jetbrains is cancelling its “new” editor, Fleet. Not that I use the product, but it got me thinking about editors (again). I love editors , specifically ones that I can change and bend to my will, such as Emacs.

    In my career I have used many different editors. I started on a Laser VTech 310 in Basic 2.0 and from there I transitioned into the world of Pascal and C/C++ to end up on the JVM with Java and Clojure . During that time I have seen many editors come and go in the work field.

  2. Advent of Code 2025 Day 5

    Day 5 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

    It was a hectic day, and it is not even over yet. I had multiple trips to the vet while trying to get some work done. To relax a bit I worked on the puzzle of the day. In hindsight I was way too cautious with my solution, but then again, it is to solve a puzzle :D

    The first thing to figure out is that a list of numbers is in a collection of ranges. Reading in the file and parsing it to numbers is something that has been done the entire week already, then it is a matter of taking the list of ingredients and mapping over the inventory, filtering out the ones that are not in range.

  3. Advent of Code 2025 Day 4

    Day 4 of solving The Advent of Code in Clojure .

    The first grid problem of the season! The first part was really suspiciously easy, read in the grid, find all the rolls and look at its 8 neighbors, eliminating it if there are less than 4. The 2nd part was a nice progression on this.

    Instead of just saying how many should be eliminated, we do it until there are no eliminations possible. This is highly reminiscent of a Conway Game of Life puzzle. In Clojure this is quite nicely done by reading the grid as a vector, and then ranging over all the coordinates. On each coordinate just take a look at the neighbors and apply the logic. Its pure nature means that the functions are already working in the right way to do this repeatedly.

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