Who am I

My name is Arvid Nicolaas. I was born, and am still living in, The Netherlands. Though I have spent some childhood years and have tight family bonds in the Netherlands Antilles (Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao).

Background

I have a background in Computer Science, and have spent nearly all of my professional life working at Philips, a healthcare company, first as a Researcher, and the last couple of years as a Development Engineer. In 2018 I took a sabbatical, during which I traveled but also spent time volunteering by developing software for 2 companies, among which Inspiring Teachers

Activities

During my graduation, I focused on Functional Programming languages, and have retained a passion for this paradigm, and especially for immutable data structures. I'm therefore happy to see that especially immutability is something that keeps coming back in whatever new programming language/framework comes by.

That is why I have spent a lot, and I do mean A LOT, of my free time, on thinking about immutable data structures and collections in various programming languages, and how they could be improved, and easily integrated into other paradigms.

At first I figured out a novel data structure to overcome some of the limitations of immutable Lists (or sometimes called Vectors). Then I decided that getting the idea popularised would only work if I create a full collection library, especially since I also found some other new concepts that I think would work well in a collection library.

Initially I worked on getting these ideas to work in Scala, at that time my favourite programming language. While I did get really far, I ran into some issues, and also I realised that the language was not getting the popularity I hoped it would.

Moving to TypeScript

Through my work, I got involved in JavaScript, and thankfully soon after that, TypeScript programming. While initially I hated the whole environment, and still I think there is a lot to improve, I came to like the TypeScript compiler because of its flexibility and freedom to define types. Especially union types are a god-sent.

So after my sabbatical, I decided to port/rewrite my never released and unfinished Scala collections library to TypeScript, and I am really happy with the results. I hope that I can use it in my work, and also that I can continue improving it and adding new ideas to it as well, and also build a community around it.

Your contribution

As mentioned before, over the past 5 or so years, I spent a lot of my free time in thinking of and developing the ideas behind the collections libraries, and then the implementation, documentation, testing and what not of the libraries also took up a long time. Much longer than I anticipated. Of course I had a daily job next to this.

Your contribution would be a great way of saying "What you did was worth it". That's all I need in return of the time I invested. I have a good job, so it's more about appreciation than money. However, if enough people sponsor, I could consider to spend more time working on the library, fixing bugs, adding new features, potentially managing a developer community, and supporting adoption.

I would also be open to port the library to other languages/frameworks.