Projects

Here is a small summary of my ongoing projects. They are mostly personal projects and many of them won’t see the light of day but some have come to fruition and even some have become obsolete…

BKMRKD.IT

Small project with nice domain name for keeping track of my bookmarks. wrote the original version of bkmrkd.it in the spring of 2017 as a personal project, partly out of frustration of not having something available that I liked enough to stick with it. I first build it in PHP using the Laravel framework but never quite finished it so that others could use it properly. In 2025 I wanted to learn more on serverless development and NoSQL databases, so what better to rewrite bkrmkd.it to use that paradigm. The current version runs on AWS lamba functions in Python, DynamoDB, SQS for processing batches, SES for emailing, S3 for static files and Cloudfront as front end caching. There is some minor javascript (for getting page titles dynamically).

Read more ongoing stuff via the bkmrkd tag

Boodschappen

Very specific project for the dutch market. A method for making sure you don’t miss the discounts on your favourite products in your local supermarket chain. What I like personally is that the user interaction works via email messages. Which in turn made it easy for me to develop and not to rely on complicated html website build. Completely build with Python, Perl and AWS SES for email messaging.

This ran for a couple of years and was very useful, however spidering websites wasn’t appreciated and we lost the ability to scrape the sites for the prices and therefore stopped as we were incomplete in our comparison effort.

Experiment

New project which is still in the idea stage and I’m experimenting with different technologies like encryption tech, AWS SQS and learning Python as a new programming language for me. Is meant as a proof of concept for now.

Small Projects

Here are some of the smaller things I’ve written that might help other: A simple setup for automated deploying of Multipass virtual machines using cloudinit. I use this setup for my Boodschappen project to roll-out machines with all the Perl and Python modules. View the repository for more information and how to use it.