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Arjen Wiersma

My name is Arjen and I am the Manager of Product Development and Chief Lecturer at Hogeschool NOVI. I work on creating the most modern and relevant educational (EduTech) products that we can offer. Through stategic partnerships and attracting the most talented content developers and technical staff we offer world class education to our students.

In my work as Chief Lecturer for Cybersecurity I focus on teaching students all there is to know about the technical side of Cyber Security. My main areas of expertise are Reverse Engineering, Infrastructure Security and Web Application Security. I also teach a wide range of Software Development courses, such as an introduction to programming, Java, DevOps and more advanced courses such as Datastructures & Algorithms, Secure Coding.

I have been in the software industry for more that 25 years and have worked in:

  • Internet providers (Chello / UPC, Tiscali - NL): Java
  • Startups (Personify - USA, eBuddy - NL): Java, BigData
  • 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

I am a member of:

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

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. Digital Ocean, its support and development database

    Tip
    Currently, only use Postgres 14 on the Digital Ocean application platform for development databases.

    While following the book Zero2Prod you will learn how to deploy a Rust application to digital ocean through a Continuous Deployment pipeline. This is hardly anything new for me, I even teach a course in DevOps, but to not stray from the path of the book I followed its instructions.

  2. The joy of NixOS

    In July 2023, I installed NixOS as my daily operating system. NixOS is a Linux distribution that emphasizes a declarative approach to system management. This means you define your desired operating system configuration in a file (e.g., KDE with Emacs 30 and Firefox), and the Nix package manager uses that file to create your OS. Every change generates a new version, allowing you to revert to a previous version if anything goes wrong.

  3. Build an API with reitit in Clojure

    In my previous post I highlighted that I set myself the goal of creating a self hosted comic book collection tool. Before that, in a post about tooling , I reiterated my ❤️ for Clojure as a language. So, this is the start of a series of articles detailing how the development is going, and also as an introduction to the various parts of the tech stack.

    Clojure is special to me in that there are hardly any big frameworks in the ecosystem. Clojure is more like Lego, there are countless building blocks of various shapes and sizes. It is up to you as the developer to stick the blocks together to get something usefull. You might guess that I also ❤️ Lego.

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