ABOUT ME

This is the about page of Warren Van Zuydam. If you want a professional profile of me, or want a professional website to view my real-world skills, then I have my LinkedIn profile, as well as my business website, so don't take this website seriously if you've searched my name on the internet as an employer or web dev client (unless you want a classic website like this, lol). This is MY wacky, personal website, so I can do whatever the heck I want here, and I don't have to use responsive, modern web dev and design standards. I spare that boring crap for my job. So make no mistake, I can do modern web dev, I just don't want my personal website to look as soulless as literally every other boring website out there today.

I am a casual gamer, YouTuber, and computer hobbyist. My internet name is Dee23Gaming, and I make YouTube videos on a free and open source alternative of Minecraft, called Luanti (formerly known as Minetest). I do play Minecraft, but it seems to be saturated on YouTube, so I might abandon Minecraft altogether as a game on my channel.

I play other games, such as Garry's Mod, BeamNG Drive, Terraria, GTA V, Counter Strike 1.6 & Source, Half-Life games (for nostalgia sake), and... yeah. My games list isn't long at all, and as I've gotten older, my interest in games as a whole has declined, except for a couple sandbox-style games.

I have recently gotten into messing with website coding, and I am enjoying myself so far. This website is not my main project, but my business website has been developed for a while now. Hopefully, I can build something for myself using that website. Unfortunately, because it's a business website, I have no choice but to abide by standard modern website design rules. This website on the other hand... Like I said, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, so I decided to go for a late '90s, pixel-based website layout. I specifically went for the panel design, as it doesn't require any webpage scrolling. I made it so that everything fits within a rectangle.

I am a huge fan of using free and open source software. I like using programs like Inkscape, LibreOffice Suite and Krita, just to name a few. We are sucked into this sick system of paying monthly subscriptions for products that we do not actually own. Buying a licence for a product is not the same as buying a physical copy of that piece of software. If my programs do not come in the form of an offline installer, then I do not own the software, and therefore, I'm totally at the mercy of that company. If you own a business, especially if you are new and trying to get your foot in the door, you do not want corporations to have control over your future. If they want to shut a software down, raise prices, or put essential free functions behind paywalls, you, and your business are then in immediate danger. This only applies to people like me, who aren't massive business owners with money to chuck around. But things are getting harder for the average person. While there have been countless advances in technology over the decades to improve efficiency, comfort, security, etc., actually obtaining these needs have become more and more expensive, or just out of reach. So that's enough of that... I get very passionate about this subject. I can talk for ages about the problems of the modern world. Another thing that bothers me is social media. We're sucked into all kinds of algorithms, on the same small group of websites. We should fight to keep the indie web alive for as long as we can.