About Jan

Hi, I’m Jan van Veldhuizen.

From punch cards to AI: that’s my career in one line. I studied mathematics in Leiden in the 1970s and fell in love with computers. I never finished the degree, but the computers never left. I found a job as a programmer and my hobby became my day job. Over the last thirty‑odd years, I worked as a developer and software architect at Onguard. Since April 2025, I’ve been happily retired, back from career to hobby.

Online, I was known as "PapaSmurf", my nickname at work. But since my retirement I’m just Jan, "Opa Jan" to my grandkids.

At home, I’ve automated a lot, from lights to blinds. I have a powerful computer running pretty much everything — a "homelab", as they call it in the nerdy world. I experiment a lot and keep learning new programming languages. I also follow AI closely and occasionally give talks about it.

Away from tech, I play the organ in church services and enjoy foreign languages. You can find me browsing through dictionaries and grammar books for hours. My interest in languages is somewhat mathematical: I enjoy grammar more than literature or culture. My wife and I love long‑distance walks and rides. In 2022 we cycled from home to Santiago de Compostela.

About this website: this is a hobby project too, and it obviously runs on my homelab. I’m planning to write three kinds of blog posts:

• Tech notes and experiments (in English)
• Fun/interesting finds about language (often in Dutch)
• The occasional musing

So the site will have a mix of English and Dutch; only this page appears in both.

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to say hello. Oh, wait... I still have to make the contact page 😛