About
My name is Zef Hemel, I work at Cloud9 IDE, Inc..
Where I’m Coming From, Going To
I was born 22nd of June 1983 in Groningen, a city in the north of the Netherlands. Yep, I’m Dutch. A cheese head — except that I’m allergic to dairy, so no cheese for me.
I got my B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Groningen. And a M.Sc. in Networks and Distributed Systems from Trinity College, Dublin. So do I speak English with an Irish accent? No, but I am able to understand the Irish, which, you must admit, is already pretty impressive.
January of 2012 I received my Ph.D. title for my thesis about the design and implementation of domain-specific languages at the Delft University of Technology. I’m currently working for Cloud9 IDE, Inc..
What I Care About
As you may have gathered, this site is mostly about the tech side of my life. I’m a programmer. I started programming when I was 9, taught to me by my dad, who taught programming at university. I got hooked immediately, and over the years used Pascal, Delphi, C, Perl, Java, PHP and many other languages.
Yet, in my late teens I got bored. Developing applications became frustrating. It took too long to get from idea to product. I needed to spend too much time or repetitive, boring tasks to get something done. I considered quitting the programming “business” altogether. And after my CS studies, in fact, I studied English for year — to get away from things. Missing programming a bit, I decided, rather than complaining about the frustrating experience of software development, to do something about it. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with my projects over the past couple of years. With WebDSL we tried to develop a new programming language to make web programming simpler, to get rid of all the repetitive stuff and let you focus on the core of the application. Subsequently, I worked on mobl to simplify the development of mobile web apps in particular.
Currently I’m working at Cloud9, the web-based IDE, where we try to push the envelop on developer’s tooling, not by designing new languages, but rather improve coding support with existing languages, e.g. Javascript and Ruby.