The name Zumuta! is based on the Dutch phrase "Zo moet dat". A sentence that I regularly use when I explain something. It means "That's the way to do it". This doesn't mean I'm always right. I don't have a monopoly of wisdom, because IT is lifelong learning.
The first computer I saw was a Commodore 64. This computer made me decide to follow computer science at school. In 1989 I finished my bachelor degree for informatics at the Karel de Grote-Hogeschool.
My first working experience was at the Belgian army. Yes, in 1990, military service still existed. I developed a system in Clipper for storing medical prescriptions in a Dbase database.
On my LinkedIn profile you can read my full career. I started working for KBC in 1991. I've done development in C/C++, Visual Basic, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, ... Until 2004 I mainly developed applications for the insurance department. I joined the EAI team and started developing programs for Websphere MQ and Managed File Transfer (Perl, Java). After 15 years, I left the MQ team, to join the network automation team. My task is now to automate manual tasks with again, another programming language: Python.
My opensource experience started with wxWidgets. I wrote some tutorials and decided to write a port to JavaScript: wxJavaScript. When wxWidgets abandoned the Data libraries I started looking for a replacement, and I found POCO. Because wxJavaScript became more than wxWidgets the name changed into GLUEscript: Glueing libraries to ECMAScript. While working on GLUEscript, I learned to write server side applications with Apache and C/C++.
In 2010, I started the MQWeb project. This project was started as a test that my idea to interact with Websphere MQ using just a browser works. The JSON library written for MQWeb was contributed to POCO 1.5.2.
In 2011, I wrote a MongoDB module for GLUEscript and I used this experience to write a MongoDB library for POCO. This is also part of POCO 1.5.2.
Due to the success of node.js, my interest in GLUEscript faded away. The main focus went to the MQWeb project and the modules I contributed to POCO.
In 2015, I contributed a Redis module to POCO.
In 2019, I still worked with IBM MQ, MQWeb and POCO. And at work I rewrote the MQWeb portal in Python and Vue.
When I left the MQ team for the network team, the MQWeb project was put on hold.
As a member of the board of the local judo club, I started working on a club management system: Kwai. Kwai is my pet-project. For me it's a way to learn, investigate and try out new things. It started as a PHP project in 2019. PHP being the only affordable way of writing and hosting a dynamic website at that time. In 2020 I started to experiment with single page applications. Kwai was splitted into two repositories: a frontend and a backend. In 2021 I switched the frontend to vite.
In 2022 I found affordable hosting for Python projects: Alwaysdata. I decided to rewrite the PHP code into Python. I also merged the two separated repositories into one monorepo. Because I don't like ORM's (and I'm not alone), and I needed a SQL query builder, I started sql-smith, a port of the PHP Latidude library.
In 2025 I started to move my code to Codeberg. After using Poetry, I switched to uv and uv workspaces which makes it possible to move sql-smith to the kwai project.
Even though kwai is a pet-project, it is used in production. You can see it in action on our club website Judokwai Kemzeke.
Besides IT, cycling is also one of my favourite things to do. You can read my cycling stories also on this website.
Franky.