About me

This site is written and maintained by Frits Jalvingh. I am a software and infrastructure architect at a medium sized Dutch company. I am Dutch, but live most of the time in France. I currently work mostly with Java and Kotlin, SQL databases like Oracle and PostgreSQL. I write both frontend and backend code. I specialize in more complex material like metadata based processing and compiler writing.

I am the principal author of a Java based UI framework called DomUI. This was open-sourced but did not become a success; to be useful you need to write documentation, lots of documentation... And currently people seem to prefer fragile solutions based on Javascript. I am writing and maintaining software for a living and for a long time; languages that are not strongly typed are a no-no for me, they are maintenance nightmares.

About where I live

When in France I live in Saint Laurent d'Agny. This is a quiet rural village in the Monts Lyonnais. Our house is on top of a hill with a magnificent view:

The view from the garden in Saint Laurent d'Agny, looking out over the valley towards the Monts Lyonnais.

The same view earlier in the year, with the Alps just visible on the horizon at the left.

On a good day we can even see the Mont Blanc:

On a clear day Mont Blanc stands out above the alpine ridge, about 200 km away.

I also live in the Netherlands every now and then, I have a house in Lelystad.

Me and my electronics hobby

I have no education in electronics at all. But in my youth it was my principal hobby until the ZX81 came along.. I built the Electuur Formant synthesizer from mostly scrap parts, on perfboard, while listening to Walhalla Symfonie on the radio.

Once I discovered computers my interest in electronics waned, but it came back a few years ago when I got kind of fed up with programming. I needed to do something else in my free time so I got back to my old love.. I started with discovering Arduino's and related things, leading to a lot of fun projects like a 32x32 large LED matrix board together with my friend Marc.

After that, infected by CuriousMarc, I started to collect old vintage measurement equipment. Mostly to learn from them, and also as a means to help with repairing things. It is amazing to me that now I own a HP 16702A Logic Analyzer while when I was young I could only dream about something like that...

My lab in France

I have a rather nice room downstairs in the house. It is about 6 x 3 m, and has a lot of nice tables:

The lab in France, with the vintage gear on the shelving at the left and the benches running down the far wall.

The other end of the same room: the desk, and the parts bins that fill the wall on the right.