Alexander Varwijk

Hello Bluesky! I’m Alexander based in the Netherlands! I’m Technical Architect at Open Social and I spend my free time reading and hanging out in inclusive communities around tech and gaming. My personal site is at alexandervarwijk.com

Wie maakt ons geld? Veel Nederlanders blijken daar nog altijd weinig zicht op te hebben. 88 procent weet niet dat private banken het grootste deel van ons geld creëren, blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek. Waarom dit kennisgebrek problematisch is, lees je in de eerste editie van ‘De politieke economie’.

Converting my existing stacked PRs into the new GitHub stacked PRs was seamless 🤩 A single GitHub CLI command and push and the new UI was available for navigation 🥳

If only Windows 11 could just leave my desktop background alone, that would be great. I don't want the pictures they select, I want the picture I select.

I love my JetBrains IDEs, but what the heck? At first I thought it was an email about their LinkedIn page. But they want to monitor how I use my IDE so that they can have AI publish it on my LinkedIn profile? Heck no. I'm getting paid for results, not for how a machine judges that I achieve them.

Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.

Regarding AI use in Drupal core and contrib development, this proposal from Théodore Biadala seems like a really good start: 🤖📋 tresbien.tech/blog/proposa... I would add that anything copy/pasted into a d.o. comment from AI should have a length limit as well. ✂️💬

@github.com Stacked PR private preview 🤩 github.github.com/gh-stack/ Our org never signed up for something so quickly, gone are the days of manually making a /note "merge in this order" 🙌 Can't wait to get in on this 🙏

GitHub is going to charge 0.002$ per minute for SELF HOSTED runners… what? 🤯 Guess Q1 of 2026 will be about figuring out what CI/CD platform we’re going to migrate to.

Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability lyra.horse/blog/2025/12... "CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"

Preventing a `drush updb` from clearing your caches #drupal #drush mglaman.dev/blog/prevent...

In the Dungeons & Dragons campaign that I DM, I kept forgetting about the passage of time. So I made a little thing to help me keep track of how much time has passed and record noteworthy events. It includes a link you can share with players that hides DM only notes.

Technology changes rapidly. As a result, we’ll have to re-evaluate the markers that we use instinctively to determine whether something is trustworthy.

Een strategische stem is een stem op Volt.

Learn how to think about asynchronous PHP, how to use the Revolt event loop and what AMPHP is! If you've missed my talk at DrupalCon Vienna then you can now watch my recorded presentation and view my slides with speaker notes at www.alexandervarwijk.com/talks/2025-1...

So I guess I solved this hard AI problem (/s)

Developers will reinvent whole battle tested libraries while saying it’s not a case of “not-invented-here” but then let AI do a half-baked copy paste job without batting an eye and trusting it blindly.

Alexander Varwijk @kingdut.ch proposes a bold redesign of #Drupal Core to support async processing, ReactPHP, and background tasks. His plan: decouple the kernel, adopt Symfony Runtime, and modernize bootstrapping across environments. Full deep-dive via TDT: 🔗 https://bit.ly/4nftKrj #PHP

Imagine if we could use the Drupal framework for any type of application. In my new blog post I outline the work needed to bring us closer: www.alexandervarwijk.com/blog/2025-09...

fuzzypost.com gave me a good chuckle #SnailMail

Streaming services that aren’t Netflix are so incredibly bad at keeping watch progress synced across devices it’s infuriating that content is so spread out across services

Chilling on the couch and playing Word Play on my iPad using a PS5 controller. Great game by @gamemakerstoolkit.com ❤️ (Playing using Steam Link 😉)

🗳️ Meet Alexander Varwijk @kingdut.ch, candidate for the 2025 #Drupal Association Board Election. From grassroots dev to global platforms, he champions multiple pathways into Drupal, sustainable funding for key modules, and a bold dev advocacy program. Full interview: https://bit.ly/4elExfS

Did BlueSky remove the “quick follow” button that were on posts or did I hallucinate that that was a thing?

“AI can replace CEOs” does not indicate a danger of AI. It indicates the capitalist problem of people going through the motions rather than using creativity to serve their communities. The danger that AI might pose is a symptom of a different problem we should solve.

The new iconography of the silence coupes in NS trains just doesn’t work.. 🫩

“We’re getting to a point where if you can’t make AI do that [some development task], then the problem is you” ~ Jamie Abrahams (www.linkedin.com/in/james-abr...)

Today it’s time for #Drupaljam! Largest Drupal event in the Netherlands, now 100% in English 🥳 Fully sold out and many amazing sessions. Really excited!

The new Firefox tab management is 🔥 Takes me a bit of getting used to that I now need to look to the right (that's a choice) rather than the top of my browser window, but it cleans up nicely and ties in well with Firefox' tab syncing and tab history features 🤩

This would be huge. It’s been _the_ operator I’ve been missing in PHP for years

Can’t wait for @gradyhillhouse.bsky.social to make a Practical Engineering video about the power outage in Spain/Portugal: www.bbc.com/news/live/c9... His black start video is likely very relevant at the moment: nebula.tv/videos/pract...

@patrickhwillems.bsky.social said “If you haven’t watched Jaws, go back and come back later I’m not going anywhere”. Today I finally watched Jaws and can continue watching Patrick. H Willems videos 🥳 didn’t realize it had been a year

Drupal Dev Days 2025 in Leuven have started! #drupal #ddd

Getting started with Cline today. First step is running my prompt through Claude Chat just to get some pointers on how to improve it 😁

Imagine if we run out

Played my first MTG pre-release today and I didn’t lose everything 🥳 Also got really good inspiration for my first constructed deck 🎉

GitHub added a "Browse History" link for files that were moved and oh-my-god do I want to buy the person who built that a beer. That has been on my wishlist _for years_. No longer will I run into a dead-end in the GitHub UI and have to locally search for the previous file name and commit. 🎉

2025, the year of breaking the habit of sending :) apparently (:

If anyone is at the Dutch PHP Conference today, come say hi! 😄

It's been a while since I looked at what GitHub has been building around issues and pull requests. They've really been hard at work to add a lot of project management tooling. Is GitHub a serious competitor for Jira yet? :o

Learning how to write a TraitExt in Rust feels like learning how to perform some black magic incantation that makes your code simpler. (In this case it was allowing anyhow's `context` on a future that returned a result so it could be `tokio::try_join!`ed) gist.github.com/Kingdutch/7b...

Same honestly

Slack is an amazing tool. It allows me to write a full explanation of my problem to a colleague and then delete it without sending because I’ve solved the problem 🦆

This is what our female colleagues at Volt say.  What does gender equality mean to you? Tag a woman who has inspired you and share what she has helped change in your worldview. 💜 We read every comment!

Lets agree that in 2025 we no longer start talks about “You can do this cool thing with AI” by rehashing “The history or AI and there’s new tools every week so my slides are already outdated, haha” Everyone including my parents have seen that introduction right?