About

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

Mark van Lent

As a technical consultant and programmer for Edition1 I spend my days either giving customers advice about their website, or actually implementing their sites. Most of these websites are based on SwordFish, a content management system built using 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 and since 2009 I also got to do Django projects. As of February 2011 I’m an employee of Edition1 and the technical lead for SwordFish, the CMS we use to build for most of our projects.

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.

The 2012 edition of this website is more ‘back to basics’. I realised that I don’t need a dynamic site at all for this weblog. So now I’m using Acrylamid to build this static blog out of articles written in Markdown.

For a more visual version of the history of this site, go to the memory lane.

Contact

If you want to get in touch with me, connect with me via (in random order):