My name is Maarten Hekkelman and I write code for a living. I prefer writing developer tools like text editors and debuggers. But since I have to feed a family, I use my skills to write other software as well. Below I've listed some of the things I came up with lately.
My ideas about software development took form during many years of using both Mac OS and Unix operating systems. I still consider the old MacOS as how software should be. Using a Mac Classic with MacOS 6 and WriteNow as word processor was like a dream. And when I see people struggling with modern bloatware, I simply feel pity for them. But hey, this is what they call progress.
I fell in that same trap myself several times. I created text editors with so many features I always had trouble remembering them myself. In the end I learned it is very healthy to dump all your code once in a while and start over from scratch.
Japi is my new toy text editor/IDE. It is an open source editor running on unix like operating systems and uses GTK for rendering its GUI.
To find out more about japi, click here.
My day job is a the CMBI. Here I've developed an information retrieval system called MRS. It is used to index over a terabyte of flat file, text based databanks containing biological and medical information. The software itself is not limited to the use in a biological or medical environment though, I use it myself to index a dump of wikipedia e.g.
You can find MRS at http://mrs.cmbi.ru.nl and since it is released under a BSD license, you can also find the source code there.
MRS uses the SOAP protocol internally. I didn't like the available tools for doing SOAP and decided to create my own. The result is a library that can be used to create a SOAP server very easily. As a bonus the library can act as a REST server as well and is capable of creating WSDL files on the fly.
libzeep is released under a Boost license. Click here for more info
Over the years I've written many applications. A few of them may have brought you here by following old links.
The first program I ever released was Sum-It, a small spreadsheet for MacOS. I also wrote a version of Sum-It for BeOS which was later released as open source (and died a quiet death immediately after).
For Be Inc. I wrote a source level debugger called bdb.
And for BeOS I wrote a new text editor called Pe. This editor was eventually open sourced as well. More information on Pe can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe_(text_editor).
Finally, I wrote Pepper, a successor of Pe initially aimed at MacOS. Later I ported this to Windows and X11 (linux) as well. Pepper was the first commercial application available for Mac OS X and I have the sales statements to prove it. It took BBEdit a week or two to catch up and I made quite a few sales in those days. Too bad it didn't last. Eventually I had to sell Pepper.