bitstorm.org

Edwin Martin about frontend webdevelopment

Edwin Martin’s Side Projects

2026 - Webontwikkelaar

A daily digest of conferences, articles, videos and podcasts for web developers. Originally built for the Dutch-speaking community, but fully available in English too.

2020 - Game of Life

Back in 1996, I built a Java applet just to teach myself the language and add some interactivity to the web. Totally rewritten in 2020, I had no idea it would turn into my most visited website and still running all these years later.

2020 - Carbonium

To keep the Game of Life as lightweight as possible, I wrote minimal clones of well-known JavaScript libraries, both as a challenge and a learning exercise. These include an RxJS clone (cuprum), a stripped-down Lit (web-component-decorator) and Carbonium, a jQuery variant. By using modern JavaScript, Carbonium weighs just 1.4 kB versus jQuery’s 35 kB, while making the core feature more powerful.

I maintain more open source repositories.

2011 - KNSM-eiland

As a 21-year-old amateur photographer, I read about the urban nomads on KNSM Island in Amsterdam. I took the following series of 50 photos there in January 1989. 22 years later, in 2011, a new residential area was built, and I retook a number of photos from approximately the same position.

For many photos, you can switch between the two timestamps.

2010 - jQuery plugins

I worked a lot with the jQuery JavaScript library and wrote two animation plugins.

Color Animation to fade one color into another.

Shadow animation to animate shadows and glow effects.

2003–2014 - Edwin’s journaal

From 2003 to 2014 I ran a weblog on a homegrown PHP static site generator (SSG), back when rolling your own was just what you did.

2004 - Firefox extensions

I really liked the concept of browser extensions and wrote two extensions.

View Cookies to view and remove cookies

Tweak Network Settings to remove some obsolete network connection limitations

2004 - Jarx

To run a Java program, you had to enter a command (java --jar program.jar) in a terminal. With Jarx, you can start the program by just double-clicking on it.

2004 - PHP sucks

After having programmed in PHP for years, I became disappointed by all the limitations of PHP and wrote this article.

2001 - Mali

In 1999 I spent time in Mali, and the photos I brought back felt worth sharing. I hand-rolled a little JavaScript gallery to display them. No frameworks existed yet, and getting animations to work across browsers was half the project.

2001 - Fontlist

I got interested in programming applications for Windows and wrote Fontlist, to display all installed fonts.

2000 - Freesco hands-on

Sharing a single internet connection across multiple machines meant buying a router, a luxury most home users couldn’t justify. Freesco changed that by turning a dusty old PC into one. I covered it in a tutorial for Dutch magazine PC-Active.

1998 - Bill Gates hit with cream pie

I already had video capture hardware and had just picked up a new 500MB hard disk, so capturing the Belgian news broadcast wasn’t a problem. The people at XS4ALL, where the page was hosted, were pretty surprised to see a personal homepage show up among their highest-traffic sites.

1996 - Teatricks

To gain experience developing in Java, I wrote a Java applet with a Tetris clone. I named it Teatricks to not get sued.

1995 - Hoedt u voor schipbreuk op de digitale zee

Together with Marcel Bullinga, I wrote a vision of the future that appeared on the Forum page of de Volkskrant.

1995 - Various webpages

I created some webpages to actually add some content to my website.

1994 - DB.NL

When I heard that the government wanted to ban encryption, I understood that this was at odds with the newly emerging Internet.

I wrote a PGP manual and posted it on the Technopolis forum of De Digitale Stad and I became active within the Digital Citizen Movement Netherlands (the precursor of Bits of Freedom).

In the summer of 1994, I worked on creating the website for this organization.

1994 - Ranx’ Hotlist

As soon as I found out that XS4ALL would give users the opportunity to create a homepage, I got to work on it in June 1994, even before it was official. My Ranx’ Hotlist thus became the first homepage. It is included in the XS4ALL Homepages Web Collection of the KB, the national library.