About jalu.ch

An introduction to the website and its author

Domain Purpose

This website is my personal "corner" of the internet, where I host some of the things I've done—mainly PHP scripts, alongside some language-related lists and projects, as well as the occasional picture.

About Me

You can contact me through the contact form; I'm always happy to receive mail.

I live in Switzerland and have a Bachelor's degree in Software Systems from the University of Zürich. Since 2015, I've been working as a software engineer and still enjoy programming in my free time—nowadays mostly in Java. My GitHub username is ljacqu.

I speak German, French and English natively. Languages interest me a lot: I've been learning Dutch off and on (and Afrikaans through osmosis by listening to music) and took a year of Russian classes. I'm interested in some topics of linguistics like writing systems and spelling, phonology (esp. sound shifts), language identification, etymology.

While I don't consider myself a "gamer", I played through quite a few video games, including Mirror's Edge, TrackMania, Halo, Minecraft, and many Tomb Raider games. In 2011 and 2012, I ran a small 11-slot Minecraft server, which turned out to be a very fun and educational experience.

Music is something I enjoy a lot, though only on a listening basis nowadays: I played the piano for five years but was neither particulary good or passionate about it. I like artists such as Grimes, Drab Majesty, Die Heuwels Fantasties, and on the heavier side, also Youth Code, La Dispute and Caliban, to name a few.

From 2007 through 2013, I was part of the support team for CuteNews (a content management system in PHP) and also maintained my own fork, UTF-8 CuteNews, which fixed security holes, ensured compatibility with newer browsers and offered more internationalization features (such as UTF-8 support and translatable fields).

Later, I spent a lot of time contributing to some Minecraft plugins, especially AuthMe, an authentication plugin. I do less programming in my free time nowadays but mostly focus my efforts on maintaining ConfigMe, a Java library for processing configuration files, as well as other projects I have on GitHub.

Design Info & Credits

This site uses SmoothScrolling (for browsers with JavaScript support) from Kryogenix.

The design is an adaption of Arcana by HTML5 UP, which uses the (now abandoned?) Skel framework and the iconic Font Awesome toolkit.

Other Links

Here are some resources or projects I appreciate.

Digital: AdNauseam, TypeIt, Can I use, UTF-8 Everywhere

Languages: American Dialects Map, Comparing Bible versions, [English] Dialect Blog, John Well's phonetic blog, (Dutch) Taal aan de wandel

Comics/fun: Sarah's Scribbles, communitychannel, Will 5:00 Never Come?, Alex Meyers, MrBallen