vLent.nl

Practicing software development

About

Mark van Lent

Hi there! My name is Mark van Lent and this is my personal weblog.

As a technical consultant and programmer for Zest Software I spend my days either giving customers advice about their website, or actually implementing their sites. Most of these websites are (based on) the content management system Plone, or the web framework Django. Lucky me: both are written in Python, my favorite programming language.

My weblog is (almost exclusively) about the things I come across while working on projects. As a result most entries are related to developing (web) applications.

Python, Plone and Django

During my Computer Science study at the Delft University of Technology, I had to use a number of programming languages, ranging from for instance Assembler for the PDP-11 and C, to Java. During this time I had jobs that required me to write in PHP and ColdFusion.

While writing my master's thesis in 2004 someone gave me a book about Python with the words “you might also like this language.” And I did! After solving a couple of Python Challenge riddles and writing scripts to automate some tasks, I decided to make writing Python code my day job.

That's how in January 2007 I ended up with Zest Software where I got introduced to the Zope and Plone world. Initially all of the projects I was involved in used Plone as a framework. But since not every website needs a content management system, we also started using Django. My first Django project was in 2009.

This site

The evolution of this website reflects my personal development. It started in the Nineties as a static HTML site listing my bookmarks. It was already a PHP site when I got the vlent.nl domain in 2003. A couple of years later, in 2008, I migrated to Plone to eat my own dog food. In 2010 I changed my mind again and figured that a blog doesn't need a complete content management system and decided to go with a more lightweight, Django based, website.

Credits

The design from this site is a slightly modified version of the Logistix theme by Free CSS Templates. The icons for the “read more” and “comments” links are from the Silk web icon set by Mark James.