Hey friends, my name is Vincent van der Linden and you can find me online as @vblinden. I am currently working at team.blue as a senior software engineer. This is my little corner of the web for stuff I've found important, handy, or just wanted to save. Hope you find something interesting! The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
Posts.
- Acronyms
- Simplicity is a feature
- Tinkerers make better engineers
- Technically proficient managers
- Do not write your own CSS framework
- Fixing the "net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED" error
- Fixing timeout when firing lots of requests with Laravel Valet
- Trusting the Laravel Valet cert
- Where are the product people?
- Starship Mission to Mars
- Implement Rigorously: The Five Step Process
- How to install AMQP on macOS
- What did you undesign?
- Deploying an application using Dokku (with HTTPS and redirects)
- Setup Let's Encrypt with Nginx
- Retrieve submodules with Git
- Never. Forget. Backups.
Projects.
- mailsurge.dev
- A lean, developer-first transactional email service that delivers the essentials without the bloat, gimmicks, or hidden pricing tricks. Verify your domain once, then send via a straightforward API with signed webhooks and delivery analytics to keep user state and suppression lists accurate.
- pennymetrics.dev
- A simple, privacy-friendly web analytics service that gives you the metrics that matter without cookies, bloat, or tracking your visitors. Drop in a lightweight script, skip the consent banner, and see visitors, pageviews, referrers, and custom events in a clean dashboard within seconds.
- chatwithyoursite.com
- Crawl your website, upload PDFs and custom text, and turn it into a chatbot that answers visitors with grounded responses. The same indexed content is available through an agent-ready search API for custom bots and copilots, with built-in chat insights to track top questions, satisfaction, and content gaps.
- goutipedia.com
- An encyclopedia and knowledge base about gout — symptoms, triggers, treatments, and practical advice for managing it. Written for patients and caregivers who want clear guidance on flares, diet, medication, and day-to-day management without wading through outdated forum posts.
- staravatars.com
- Create beautiful space and star based avatars from any text—a deterministic hash turns your name, email, or path into a unique cosmic portrait every time. Pick from palettes like sunset, ocean, and forest, customize shape and size, and embed them anywhere you need personality instead of a boring default avatar.
- nederboard.nl
- A Dutch meme soundboard packed with snippets from viral videos, TV moments, and internet classics across the Netherlands. Browse boards for fan favorites like Helemaal knettah and Rustahg, hit play to share the clip, and discover dozens more.
- iloveitshipit.com
- A small, for-fun soundboard of the legendary words spoken by Scott Hanselman during a .NET conference back in the day. Click to replay "I love it, ship it" whenever you need a morale boost before merging that pull request or pushing code to production.