My name is Sydney de Ruiter, a frontend developer living in the Netherlands. I've been working on websites since 1995(!) as a hobby which somehow turned into a profession somewhere around 2001. So yeah, I've been doing this for a little while!
My original background is in software engineering where I have worked for companies such as RDW where I developed middleware applications in Delphi and several other smaller companies which no longer seem to exist (1. don't blame me, 2. gods, I'm old).
Over the years since I have worked on numerous small to large projects with brands such as ANWB, Holland Casino, Rabobank, Roularta Media & VVN where I have provided the frontend of their Drupal projects. During those projects I've delved in all sorts of side work like creating a unified local development environment and various DevOps activities. I've been called a classical software engineer with a love for frontend.
When I'm not geeking out behind a laptop I like to read, watch movies, take walks (preferably in Scotland) and look at the stars.
You can catch up with me on Mastodon, Bluesky & Pixelfed.
About this site
This site was “hand crafted” in Drupal with a home brewed theme. I did my best to integrate everything I learned in frontend development over the years when it comes to SEO, metadata & accessibility and have been working hard at reducing the HTML to a minimum (that last one is a work in progress, this is a CMS after all). CSS is (duh) also my own (no bulky frameworks here!).
The tech stack
I'm using Composer to build the Drupal environment (core, contrib modules & libraries) and have made a development build with Gulp to compile my Sass code (hey, I like to put my code in neat little partials, okay?). Locally I run the site in a DDEV container and have actually put the code in a private GitHub repository.