This webpage serves the purpose of showing the world my experience with computers and programming in general and with web development in particular.

Note: I am currently working on this page. Some links might not work and, in particular, there are a lot of links to be added.

Go directly to: web development – computer skills – research – job and education history – contact

Web Development

I made my first website back in 1996 and have continued making them ever since. Sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid. Sometimes because I was asked to, sometimes just because I felt like. In the autumn of 2006, I decided that a career in science was not what would make me happy in the long run and I decided to become a professional web developer. In my current job, I am using perl as the main programming language. This includes OO Perl, mod_perl, the DBIX class to communicate with a MySQL database, the AxKit (XML, XSLT) platform and a great many modules and handlers.

Of course, I have plenty of experience with front-end web development as well: (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. I have proved to be able to acquire new tools and languages within a short period of time.

Here are some examples my work in the past:

North Baits
I wrote the full code for this small company website, which includes HTML, CSS, PHP and some AJAX (for the lightboxes that can be seen here).

Think Small
I started this website as an online music magazine in the beginning of 2002. In the course of years, it has turned into a personal blog though; still mostly about music. I try to keep the focus of the site on the content, but it uses a number of modern web-techniques, including AJAX-driven comments. I had written a simple content management system for it, but after some years, I decided to go the easy way and use the more advance WordPress system.

WordPress plugins
I have written, and am still writing, a number of plugins to make WordPress serve my own and other people’s needs even better. Just like WordPress itself they are written in PHP and use a MySQL-database, but some make use of advanced XML, CSS and AJAX.

Schoolblog (ongoing, unpublished)
A big plugin that turns WordPress into a multi-user bloggin tool, where blog-access is restricted to and within user groups. (Project for a secondary school.)

WP Word Count (published)
A very simple plugin that counts the number of words in a WordPress post

Google Reader Sidebar (almost ready for publishing)
A plugin that loads the most recent ‘shared items’ from Google’s RSS Reader and publishes them in the sidebar (or anywhere else on your website).

Fuzzy Last.fm plugin (future project)
This plugin should not only publish your recently played tracks, according to Last.fm, in the sidebar, but should also store them in a database, so that other you could run your own queries on them. Should include the possibility to combine the playlists for multiple users.

Blog 2.0 (future project)
A future plugin, that so far only exists in my head, that makes your blog fully AJAX-driven, like Gmail or Google Reader.

De Subjectivisten
Although I would not considered this website as good web development anymore, it was the first big project I ever did. The site runs on the blogging tool Movable Type (before it went commercial) and I wrote some PHP/CSS code that hacked the tool a little bit, to fully serve the website’s needs.

NMC 2003
A website I wrote with a colleague for a big conference we organised. The website isn’t very impressive, just plain HTML and CSS and it doesn’t even validate – the conference itself was much more impressive.

My personal website
This website has been running since 1996. As I have left the university, I reduced it to a single page containing information about my research.

Computer skills

My computer skills include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Programming languages
Perl (including OO Perl and mod_perl), PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.
My knowledge of these languages, that I am constantly updating, combined with a strong background in mathematics, make me able to learn new languages very fast: usually within a day of studying a new language, I will be able to write small programs.

Web development
(X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, MySQL, AJAX, Apache, CMS‘es (WordPress, Movable Type, Pivot).
Experience in web development can be seen above. I have experience with several graphical programs, such as GIMP and Adobe Photoshop, but in general are more a developer than a designer.

Operating systems
Linux (RedHat, SuSE), Unix (Solaris), Windows (all versions).
I have several years of experience, both as a user and as a system administrator, of Linux systems; I am comfortable using the Linux command line.

Mathematics software
LaTeX, Maple, Magma etc.

Other computer skills
Experience with the majority of widely used software, including MS Word, MS Excel and OpenOffice.

Research (mathematics)

I have worked as a researcher in algebraic geometry from 2001 to 2006. During these years, I have visited a great number of conferences, given several talks and written a number of papers. See my website at the university of Nijmegen for a more detailed overview of my research.

Job and Employment history

A brief history:

2007- Web developer at Virus Bulletin.

2006 Free-lance web-development (both paid and unpaid).

2006 Honorary Research Assistant to the Pure Mathematics group at the University of Exeter (unpaid; involves actively taking part in seminars, without any further obligations).

2001-2005 Junior Researcher in Algebraic Geometry, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

1998-2000 Student-assistant for several courses at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

1996-2001 M.Sc. degree in pure Mathematics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

1990-1996 Secondary school at the level VWO, G.S.G. Helinium, Hellevoetsluis, The Netherlands.

Contact

Since September 2006, we live in Exmouth, Devon, UK. I can be best contacted by email, use either M.Grooten @ math.ru.nl or thinksmall @ gmail.com. In general, I use the former address for more ‘formal’ correspondance, but I check both regularly.