Who is Bert-Proesmans?!

TLDR; I’m a computer guy. The actual answer consists of more words, but I try to keep it light.

Quickies

  • My name is Bert Proesmans, no surprise there,

  • Lives in Belgium,

  • Loves to program (random) stuff,

  • Occasionally wastes a lot of energy thinking long and hard about dilemmas and the Golden mean in nature and man-made constructs.

  • Online aliases: Bert-Proesmans, BertP

Long answer

Without going too far back into the events that made me who I am today, the period where I built out the biggest part of my personality was between age 17 and age 20. I’ll always look back at this timespan as getting #woke (old meme by now, I know). To properly contextualize me at the start of this period of my life;

  1. I’ve had the luxury of smart and caring parents (thanks mom and dad!) and close family,
  2. I was supported, and encouraged to take on any challenge on my path,
  3. For a long time I’ve lived kind of selfishly, not caring about other people and their feelings,
  4. What is a setback, I’ve never encountered that before?

In those three years since age 17, I failed to successfully transition to the next year of high school. I had a one-year do-over, which was certainly painful for a while. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad because I felt the importance of a good understanding of basic education.. and made more friends on the way. I got my degree one year late.

I started university, where I quickly realized that flukes are not a normal thing. There were certainly walls I ran into but being surrounded by smarter people made me push myself to climb them. This wasn’t always a solo effort, and I thank every one of my teammates for their rigor. I learned that respect for each other is a basic necessity because without it no type of relationship lasts… especially when those people have not perfectly aligned values. To this day I still prefer being surrounded by smarter people!
There were also sad moments; people falling off or losing interest. It felt like my year do-over but worse because now I was the guy progressing on our trajectory and others were stumbling.

Years in a university are short, you meet new people and never see them again very quickly. Other than that you’re forced to do your own time-management, decide your own workload, and develop yourself. This is a period where I was privileged to float in between responsibilities without consequences.
And I enjoyed this responsibility-free life very much, even though it was partly detrimental to my being. A summary would be; I got fat behind my computer.
It was a fun time, I look back to all of my school days with joy. I understood very well how luxurious that time was, and now it’s hard to rehab from that way of living.

I tried to put a part of me into the above text, but I doubt it communicates well enough. I do remember taking a personality test in 2020 which, in my opinion, should better transcribe my reasoning. Apparently, personality changes over time, so the link is date stamped for reference, see below.

16 Personalities test result (2020-12)

Education

I’ve always been studying sciences on top of basic mathematics and language skills. I’m fairly confident in my Dutch and English, but my French and German are at a below-average level.
At university, I chose Computer Science to prepare for a potential career in software/hardware development or any of their derivations. One of the most surprising things I learned is that all science domains cross-pollinate, so my science background proved useful. I’ve had the pleasure to work with passionate people who taught me advanced topics in their respective fields. Outside of school, over the internet by example, I managed to pick up interesting bits of knowledge through the same means.

Important to note is that I didn’t finish any higher degree. To quit school and start working is actually one of the few actively deliberate choices I made in my life.
I certainly don’t regret that decision, other than that there isn’t much else to mention.

Rundown;

  • 2006-2013: High school - Science+Mathematics,

  • 2013-NOPE: Hasselt University - Computer science.

Programming projects

My personal programming activity is tracked by Github and publicly available. My professional coding is conducted within private employer boundaries.
Some highlights below;

  • Protobuffer decompiler [C#] - open source @HearthSim community
    Decompiles specific protobuffer schema’s from binaries

  • Private servers and protocol investigation tools - closed source @HearthSim community
    HearthStone related stuff.

  • Shift scheduler [Java-Python] - closed source @university
    Project built with the purpose of properly planning coding efforts and cooperating with team members (6 people).
    The end product is a platform comprised of 2 systems, built to be usable by youth movements, student clubs and businesses;

    1. Website for managing associated people, their shift schedules, availability, preferences and customizable weights to tune the scheduler,

    2. Back-end system generating schedules which measure up to the expectations of as many associated people within provided constraints

  • Wire connection overview - closed source @Europower Generators bv
    A Solidworks Electrical drawing data processor that outputs wire connections in a table. The order and direction of wires is optimized to simplify production preparations (eg wire cutting in bulk) and the actual connecting work.
    Output is used in tandem with Single-line diagrams.

  • Robot simulator [Java] - closed source @university
    A project built with the purpose of properly planning coding efforts and cooperating with team members (2 people).
    The end product is a (2D, top-down) visual simulator of robots interacting with their environment. The robots were programmable by writing Lua and interacting with our exposed API.