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My first NAS was a Synology DS109. Apart from the fact that it didn't have redundant disks (I actually bought a DS109j as well, to give to my parents and act as a replica, but in practice, I've never set up the replication), I really liked it. Synology's support is outstanding, their latest firmware release is from 2017, 8 years after the device came to the market . But in 2015 support officially ended, still an impressive 6 years.

I've bought my first SSD 13 years ago, in October 2009. For 199.98 euro, I bought the 80 GB Intel X25-M, to be used in my work laptop. Just before that, I had a chat with someone from our infra department, and asked them casually how much trouble I would get into if I swapped my harddrive in my laptop for an SSD (I learned - they didn't really like it when I bridged my ethernet connection to connect my PDA to the network...). The answer was: not really, they were quite interested in the speed improvement themselves.

Somebody at work asked my input for good books for starting (Java) developers. As this is something that might be useful for others as well, I'll post my list here as well. This list contains books that I found to be the most influencal to me - and are timeless. So, by design, I won't include really specific books (the 'how to use scrum' of 'spring 5.0' type of books) and books that were really good, but I would not recommend in 2022 anymore (eg, 'The Pragmatic Programmer', 'Extreme Programming Explained').

There are a lot of good Youtube videos on steaming milk with your espresso machine. For example, these videos by James Hoffmann or Lance Hedrick.

When I learned Java 22 years ago, I could not know how much impact it would have on my career. At that time the language was only 3 years old (I certainly didn't know that at that time...), but the University of Twente used it already for teaching their Object Oriented and Imperative Programming class (a lot of AWT (Swing didn't exists yet), and Applets - that will be the future!). I still have my copy of Deitel & Deitel - Java: How to program, 2nd edition.

"Do you really want a new hobby? Because that is what espresso at home is." - James Hoffmann. Apparently I do, as I just bought an espresso machine, and don't really like coffee...

Ok, for a few years I'm irritated by the following:

After a few years, my box of sugar cubes started to become a bit empty. So, it was time to buy a new box. And this obviously means some research. It didn't take long (hey, there are not that many options...) till I stumbled upon this claim:

At Jibes I was in the fortunate situation that I was provided with a top-of-the-line laptop with full rights that I could also use privately. And at Quinity I still used a regular PC at home. So, until recently, I never had to buy a private laptop (I did bought some private laptops in the past, but those were always as an 'extra').