My name is Floor and I'm a Dutchie living in Vienna, spending my days learning Rails and Ruby. I'll try and use this page to explain as to why, if you heard it all before - or if you're just here to read my blog - you can skip at any time ;)

So. This all started two or three years after I graduated art school. I had built up a track record as a (freelance) community - or: social media - manager at an incubator, a number of startups and at two different advertising agencies and I found myself on a plane to Vienna. I changed country and home for a job and once settled in I felt that something was missing. I missed making things. But it didn't have anything to do with designing for print. Working closely together with the development team at Tupalo.com I discovered I missed creating stuff, testing if it works, adjusting, improving, breaking... and all the frustration and satisfaction that comes with the process.

Early autumn last year I tried out the Rails Girls tutorials. And then Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. And then a bunch of guides I found online or were recommended to me by a friend and coworker, who then became my mentor for my one-day-a-week coding efforts for Tupalo. Exploring the workings of Rails, API's, CSS, Yaml, Rspec and a whole lot more I eagerly worked on a widget and fixed some bugs. My interactions with users for many years made me want to master writing and fixing bug reports and translating users wishes to something the developers could work with and the other way around, writing blogs explaining refactorings or new features to users.

Instead of looking for a new job I decided to spent my time (or most of my time, I somehow need to support myself as well as save up for Hackbright Academy / Hacker School, if they'll have me) studying to become somewhat of a decent junior developer. My ultimate goal with all of this? I would love to bridge the gap between marketing / communications and the development team as they appear to be two islands reluctant to talk to each other at most companies I worked for or had the pleasure of visiting. IT recruitment also has my special interest, mainly because it's often done so wrong. That's why I'm involved with Jobs on Rails.

I'm now spending my weekends at the hackerspace Metalab in Vienna, pair programming a guild website for our mentor (different guy) from scratch. Every week I tune in to Ruby Rogues, I try and follow as many online courses as possible and I read my way through HN and a bunch of other sources upon waking up. Additionally I am part of the organizing team for the WordPress meetups and vienna.rb meetups in Vienna and I'm working on Rails Girls The Hague, for organizing the Rotterdam edition was a blast. Additionally I'm one of the initiators of PyLadies Vienna and Coders without Borders.

I'm nowhere near the state that you could (or should) leave me alone with your source code expecting magic but I'm getting there, mind you.

If you'd like to know what I find interesting, follow me on Twitter. I make all kinds of lists (but mostly on programming stuff) on Kippt. I like to add people that I consider to be 'gezellig' to my Facebook. You'll find my professional endeavors on LinkedIn. And some more geeky (re)blog attempts and shitmyboyfriendsays on Tumblr. What can I say? Social media will always be my second nature...