About me

My name is Tim Wienk, as you probably already knew before you set foot on my website. I was born on April 3rd, 1989 as a 2.5kg / 5.5 lbs pile of meat. Now we're quite a few years further on the road and there's about 30 times as much of me.

Mostly thanks to my dad I've been working and doing things with computers since I was a child. There's a Commodore 64 around the house somewhere, and most of the 80286s, 80386s and 80486s just moved out. When I was nine or ten years old (in 1999) I did a school presentation about "the computer". I took all the parts of an old 80286 computer with me to school, explained about the computer, named and explained about the different parts and put them all on the motherboard while doing that. At the end of the project I gloriously pressed the Power button and it booted Windows 3.11 without any trouble!

I've been interested in computers, their software and websites ever since. After a few failed attempts at building websites I finally decided to make this one.

Furthermore I played football ("soccer" for the Americans out there) in the past. Started at Achilles'12 in my home town, moved to B.W.O. later on and played there till about the age of fourteen. After that I started doing some bicycle racing with one of my neighbours and kept it up with a friend of mine till about 2 years ago. When we kind'a stopped doing that, I got myself a fitness center membership for a while, together with three other friends. This indoor sporting wasn't really my thing though. So I'm back to cycling, well.. when it gets a little warmer again. It's no fun in winter.

Another thing I like to do, but I don't really do a lot is playing the guitar. I have two electric guitars and an amplifier right next to me as I type this. I try things on them every now and then, but not enough really. At my parents' wedding anniversary in 2007 I did pick up the band's guitar and played a little Knockin' on heaven's door. (I also sang with it, which I probably should have never done, I think it killed at least a dozen people.) But more than that I haven't really done or tried. Maybe something for the future!

During all this time I have attended school too, of course. First thing you have to know is that the Dutch school system is quite a lot different from most other system. From the age of four till the age of twelve I attended a primary school ("basisschool") called Titus Brandsma. I had no trouble getting through this school, and I ended up attending pre-university education ("VWO") at a school called De Grundel after finishing the primary school. Started off at the "Gymnasium" level, but dropped Ancient Greek and Latin after about five years because it took up too much time for almost zero profit in the future. So from that point on I was basically attending school at an "Atheneum" level.

Up until the senior year I had no real trouble at that school either, everything went just fine! But in that senior year, the day before I had to do some school exams, I was told that I was excluded from two exams because I supposedly didn't hand in some required documents. Well, I really had handed them in. After a lot of fighting and bull shit about it, I told them I wouldn't be coming back for the rest of the year, seeing as I wouldn't be able to pass the year anymore anyway. I did some research, tried to find a next study to do, but for the things I wanted I -had to- finish this senior year. So the year after I went back to do the senior year once again. I attended way less lessons than I should have, I was totally done with it all. But things went as planned, and I finished it just fine.

Work! Yes, I work too! Back when I was like fourteen years old I ran around delivering newspapers. But when I turned fifteen a friend of my parents asked me if I wanted to work at the supermarket he was managing. So I did. I worked there for like four years, I always enjoyed doing the work there, though towards the end it got quite old. That's one of the reasons I went looking for something new. Through a friend I got in contact with a web developing company and got a job there, it's a company called BlueBear. Started off as a front-end developer, but I basically do all kinds of software development there right now.

Through all the web related development I've done over the years, I got acquainted with a very awesome javascript framework called MooTools. It's got an awesome community, there are great people with great ideas about code, javascript and hackathons, and I'm really glad to be part of its team.