It’s not the banks, not the big corporations, nor the military. The cancer of the man-made world, are the fils-à-papa who run the show.
I am Wouter Soudan. I’m a humanities academic, turned typographer, turned frontend developer. Life turned me into a techno-libertarian anarcho-conservative cypherpunk, too.
I got a PhD in art history and did a post-doc in computational linguistics. In my Sturm-und-Drang period (when I studied classical languages and philosophy) I founded Van Nu & Straks, a bibliophilistic literary magazine. Before short, I was a professor of typography, lectured on graphic and UX design, and did some freelancing. Today, I make webapps and a living as a usability engineer. In my spare time I still design typefaces, tinker with my Original Heidelberg letterpress, and dream up software.
Allow me to disagree, Mr Scheire, since I contend that Latin is anyhow less outdated than FORTRAN, less niche than COBOL, and at least as useful as Java when it comes to learning new languages.
Easter 2015
Apollo’s sanctuary in Delphi is a holy place. I hoped to feel and breathe that solemn sanctity, and kneel, with pietas, before Phoebus Musagetes, the bright God of the Arts. Yet, when I arrived at the entrance of the ancient site, I found a late-capitalist scenery of people queuing at something more of a theme park.
2014, July 13
Treating myself with a personal website at WouterSoudan.be. (That’s right, the one you’re visiting.) I intend to post here links to the stuff I’m working on and which I deem — in some form or another — releasable. This website will also be an exhaust valve of sorts for my dormant discord with existence in general, and my unease with being a ζῷον πολιτικόν in particular. The website for my graphic design studio and webdev shop is still in limbo, but do have a look at my portfolio at Rhythmus.be.
Whit Sunday 2014
Releasing a second pre-beta sneak preview of our app: Popol v0.2.0.
2014, June 6
I committed a small open source contribution. Forked cben’s wonderful Mathdown app (= Markdown + Mathjax + Firepad), and did a redesign. The showcase is Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity, typeset in the browser. Fork the repo @ github.com/rhythmus/mathdown
2014, May 24
Yesterday evening, my brother and co-founder found his home burglarized. In broad daylight — while he and his wife were out of work, their children in kindergarten — the police had entered and a bailiff inventoried the household. The intruders left a notice on the kitchen table: next month their furniture will be sold publicly.
May 21, 2014
Are we not nothing but colliding pixels, spastic automata in Demiurge’s uncanny valley, devoured by a Game of Life?
2014, May 15
I wrote a proposal for a lightweight, database-less, general purpose, name-based file management app, on the occasion of Hacker News’s Idea Sunday. Read the white paper at gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629.
Easter Sunday 2014
“Goeiemiddag! Er was een aangetekende zending voor mij?” Ik schuif het briefje onder de pansterglazen wand die burger en systeem van elkaar scheidt.
14 april 2014
We pivoted. Again ;-) But this time it feels just spot-on: algorithmic, generic, lean, and both B2B/B2C… Releasing a pre-beta sneak preview of our newest app: Popol.li, a smart and fun way to upvote your favorite things and share pop polls with friends. Start following us on Twitter @playpopol and on Facebook.
2014, March 1
We set the Internet on fire. >60k views, >700 Facebook shares, >90 (re)tweets, all in under three days. It’s heartening that people are still indignated by big corp’s parasitism.
2014, January 17
Imagine there was no such thing as a “legal person”. Imagine no legal entity other than a natural person, born of the flesh, was granted property rights and could file lawsuits.
2014, January 7
My younger brother has been programming since age 12, got a MSc in CS, and runs his own dev shop since he left college. Most of what he knows, he learnt himself. I instead hated computer games, struggled with maths, became a humanities scholar, but always loved reading about science and playing around with software.
2013, December 30
Star and fork my curated collection of Markdown resources: 𝗠⬇ dialects, editors (both native and web based), parsers, stylesheets, etc. Please feel free to commit and file me a pull request: repo @ github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources.
2013, November 10
Our universities are going down the drain. They’ve become cash-burning bureaucracies ruled by a managerial caste of impostors who speculate with the inflation of degrees, diploma’s and titles. Young idealist researchers are the proverbial children thrown out with the bath water.
2013, September 10
I’ve been working like mad on a decent website for my design studio and dev shop @ Rhythmus.be. It’s a lot more work than I hoped for. Unfinshed, unreleasable. Meanwhile, do have a look at my portfolio.
2013, August 25
A bitter rant on the paradox of modern society: productive creativity is being discouraged in favor of paperwork management.
2013, August 20
Proudly presenting our bleeding-edge cross-browser responsive web app to our client @Citypath_Gent. One of the first commercial webapps built on @meteorjs. Development by @sewdn, information architecture, UX, product design & frontend by @rhythmvs. Do check in at Citypath.eu!
2013, July 11
Build an algorithmic Bitcoin trading bot (aka black-box): minimize risk, maximize profit, optimize speculative gain.
2013, April 5
Celebrating my 34th birthday: presenting our startup at Idealabs incubator, Antwerp. Sign up for gamma and start testing our app: ❤ MyTwoCents.in
2013, March 7
Lezersbrief in Vɘto, gericht aan Em. prof. dr Ir A. Oosterlinck, Voorzitter ad vitam Associatie KU Leuven, n.a.v. het debat op 13 februari 2013.
25 februari 2013
In debat gegaan met de Voorzitter van de Associatie. I might have infuriated the über-rector of my Alma Mater, in public. Or, how not to secure one’s career in academia… ’t Staat op YouTube, in Vɘto, en in De Witte Raaf.
13 februari 2013
I gave a talk at #ests2012, Amsterdam. Presenting my post-doc project in computational linguistics and electronic editions: Antroponymischwoordenboek.be
2012, November 23
I wrote a piece on, well, what my goal is, as a knowledge architect, and why I want to become a developer. “Social epistemics”, hello world!
2012, March 12
I founded Rhythmus, typographic design studio, letterpress printing office & private press. Practicing the fine art of letterpress printing on an Original Heidelberg Tiegelpresse.
2005, August
