About me

My name is Dimitri “g00glen00b” Mestdagh. I’m a 34 year old full-stack developer from Antwerp, Belgium. I was fascinated with technology quite early when I got my first computer running Windows Me with 64Mb of RAM. I spent a large potion of my youth on IRC, eventually getting introduced to programming by writing scripts for mIRC and by spending various hours while programming my graphing calculator.

Currently I’m:

Technologies I use

I’ve learned various programming languages over the years, such as C#, PHP, COBOL, Pascal, C, Java, JavaScript and so on. However, my expertise and expertise lie in Java and frameworks such as Spring, but also web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and libraries like Angular, React and Vue.

I’m not really a book-guy. When I want to learn something new, I’ll start by practicing first, rather than learning the theory. For me, learning new technologies is like learning how to ride a bike. You practice, fail, get back up and repeat.

Why I’m blogging

I started writing articles to document what I did during my internship at Cronos and what technologies I used. While documenting is still one of the reasons I’m writing new articles, it’s no longer the driving force behind them. Right now, writing articles is a great way for me to explore the wondrous world of web development, and to be able to share my view with the rest of the world.

Hopefully, other people with the same interests find these articles interesting or helpful. I also hope that others can help me expand my vision, so feel free to contact me with suggestions, ideas, opinions or chain letters (no, the last one isn’t true!).

How did you come up with “g00glen00b”

My real name is a bit too long, and since I spent a large portion of my youth on IRC, I had to come up with a username; In my case it actually started as a joke. My parents aren’t really tech-savvy, and I once saw my dad asking Google questions like “can you please tell me what the results are of the latest football game”, so I came up with “google newbie”, and since I came up with this when leetspeak was popular, it eventually became googlenoob.

Spare time

When I’m not writing new blog articles, I’m often walking around in the parks near me. In other cases, I also enjoy watching movies, series and anime. I’m not a real die-hard bingewatcher though, but I can enjoy certain mainstream anime and series. I also like playing games once in awhile, usually shooters, but I’m also a fan of playing MMORPGs.