Hi there. I’m Daniël van den Berg, IT-professional. I live in The Netherlands (also, incorrectly, known as Holland), Europe. My life started in 1995, and around the age of seven I started to get into programming. Or well, programming… HTML and a bit of CSS. It took me until 2008 to truly get into what you can call programming, using a software called Game-Maker. Ever since, I’ve been hooked.
Game-Maker to me has been a great stepping stone to bigger projects. A lot of the principles I’ve applied there, I’ve been able to apply in other languages too. After growing out of Game-Maker, I started programming in PHP and Java.
In 2011 a game called Minecraft first showed it’s face. It’s a small game I think some of you might have heard of. Relatively soon after coming out, a group of developers started creating a custom server called Bukkit. This server allowed for adding plugins to servers, written in Java. And be honest, who would not get a blast out of combining programming and gaming?
In the past I’ve taken up quite some small IT-related tasks, but only once I started studying Computer Engineering have I really been able to make my hobby into my job. But hobbies will stay hobbies, and I still love to tinker around in my free time, when I’m not busy with married life.
This website mainly serves as a dumping ground for some of my projects. Sometimes I simply need to write something out or be able to run something online, which is when stuff will end up on here.
Throughout my education, Computer Engineering, the focus has not been on huge computer systems, that find their complexity in sheer size. The focus of my education has been on programs that are complex due to their complexity, and small footprint. I’ve learned to work with IC’s, PCB’s and have touched the (rather interesting) topic of FPGA’s. This is also (fortunately) the area of IT that interests me most, small and complex systems.
This background in programming microcontrollers has lead to the most interesting projects. Most of them rather small, but one stands out as an example of what I love to do, a groundwater level meter.
Attached to this pole is a small barometric water level meter, that’s lowered into a pipe drilled into the ground. The difference of pressure between the surface and the barometric meter is converted into an analog signal, which is processed by an Arduino. This Arduino then controls the LED-strips, one for the current water level, one for the all-time low and one for the all-time high, and sends the reading over serial USB to a Raspberry Pi. The Pi then connects to a server to store the reading in a CSV-file on the network. I absolutely loved this project because it was small, has to run for years on end, and could easily be chopped up into small sections. Also, the enthusiasm from the company I worked for at the time and the result were amazing.
Besides this project, I’ve created a couple of Android apps, collaborated on the Android Password Store project, put online a website or two, and run multiple private projects.