Look who's here

Hi fellow Steemers,  

As the welcome section mentions in the “To Do List”: create your "introduceyourself" post. Who am I to contradict politeness to a new community. 

First of all Jef Patat is not my real name. It’s a nickname I use ever since I set my first steps on the internet. And that has been a while. Remember those funny dial-up sounds? If you’re nostalgic you can get to hear it once more together with a short explanation of the content you can check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo Jef Patat is actually a character from a Flemish comics series (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanus_(comics) ). So, Jef Patat, I was young, liked the antagonist character and never changed it. If you'd like to know how he looks like, this is a picture of one of the older editions: The Jef Patatoes invasion. 

For all clarity. I do not resemble my nickname at all. I have no problem of sharing details with individuals I know better, but at first I like to keep an air of mystery about it all. The nickname will stay, the person behind will slowly show. Professionally I'm a software developer. A big part of my career has been writing embedded software. Some on micro controllers other on SoC. I always like to work in small teams which gives me more R&D. Besides the main embedded work I also write desktop software. Most of it is coupled tightly to the embedded work. The languages used the most are C, C++ and C#. Currently I'm working on bigger WPF application and a PIC32 side project. 

In my leisure time I always have more ideas than I have time to complete them. Lately I have been 3D printing, designing and making PCBs, writing software, diy in the house and I try to spend as much time as possible with my family. 

5 years or so ago I did some Bitcoin mining but decided to stop because I wasn’t making any real money. Later I heard about it now and then, mainly in dubious context of criminals, darknet and viruses. Lately the Bitcoin fork news got my attention. I started reading about it again and it got me fascinated once more. Clicking my way through the internet I ended up on GridCoin. I have been a long term (intermittent) user of Boinc. The result of it all being I’m super enthusiast about GridCoin. Getting up and running with gridcoin was not plain sailing. In fact I’m not sure if I’m yet sailing at all. Looking for information got me to steemit quite a few times. At first I didn’t really care what site I was on, but after a couple of hits Steemit itself got me interested. And I started to like the idea. 

I’ve always liked to teach. I actually got to do that at my first job but then I chose another direction. I have had a site in the past about electronics but after a while I got fed up paying for the hosting and maintaining it. My dream never was to get rich with it (if my wife wins the lottery that would be very fine, but I’m not pursuing richness), I only wanted to help out others, to spread some knowledge to the world. I only thought it would have been fair to see the costs covered in return for my sharing. I like the idea of sharing on the internet with those interested and from time to time I’m thinking about a blog. But that would end up being a personal blog about too many different topics that then are again hard to find. To cover the costs I would have to start looking into advertising and I block ads myself and I would again need to maintain or depend on a third party. So I never really started doing it. After discovering Steemit I said to myself: maybe this is it, give it a try or nothing will happen at all. 

So I’m planning to stick around for a while, let's hope this turns out to be a positive experience. Next story will probably be about my first steps with GridCoin and how to get started with a Boinc background. Looking forward to all your comments, feedback and following.