the software archeologist’s lab

What happens when
curiosity gets root access

Apps, picture books, essays, talks, and one gloriously unnecessary programming language. A one-person lab, digging up where software has been to work out where it’s going.

Now with 100% more “why did he build that?”

01 Apps The store 16 apps 02 Books The bookstore 4 editions 03 Talks The stage 14 talks 04 Blog Field notes 38 posts 05 Scrum Programming language #INTENT 06 Artist The artist Press play 07 Insta The dig 12 finds 08 About The archeologist 1 human
16
apps in the lab
38
field notes filed
4
books in print
60+
years of IT dug up
1
suspiciously helpful robot
0
cookies served
LEVEL 01 THE STORE

Apps from the lab

All free. Download a release, launch the web build, or read the source. No cookies, no upsell, no regrets.

mITyStudio screenshot
NEW
STUDIO
music

mITyStudio

A local-first AI music studio. Describe a song, get a real multitrack project you can shape by hand — and sing it in a voice you trained.

Get ↓CodeInfo
Music Agent screenshot
AGENT
music

Music Agent

A multi-agent system that composes electronic tracks and plays them through Sonic Pi. Bring snacks.

Get ↓CodeInfo
mITyGuitar screenshot
GUITAR
music

mITyGuitar

Turns a Guitar Hero controller into a real practice guitar — chords, charts and all. Your neighbours: thrilled.

Get ↓CodeInfo
PiBeat screenshot
NEW
PIBEAT
music

PiBeat

A live-coding music environment for people who would rather write rhythm than drag rectangles. Runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Get ↓CodeInfo
Ghosts in the Machine screenshot
NEW
GHOSTS
game

Ghosts in the Machine

A haunted IT management sim. The tickets are ghosts: they queue, they escalate, and if you ignore them they mutate.

Get ↓Play ↗CodeInfo
mITyFighter screenshot
FIGHT
game

mITyFighter

A retro 2D arcade fighter, built in half a day with Copilot. The real boss is legacy code.

Get ↓Play ↗CodeInfo
Hipster screenshot
HIPSTER
game

Hipster

Guess the song, place it on the timeline. A web remake of Hitster — with a music library that actually knows Belgium.

Get ↓Play ↗CodeInfo
LoveFlix screenshot
LOVE
fun

LoveFlix

An AI experiment that rewrites any movie as a romance — poster, plot and all. Where every movie finds its heart.

Get ↓CodeInfo
Sports Madness screenshot
SPORT
fun

Sports Madness

Drops short-lived "boosters" and "maddies" into a normal match, so any sport turns strategic and slightly chaotic.

Get ↓Web ↗CodeInfo
mITyStories screenshot
STORY
fun

mITyStories

Generates complete illustrated picture books and comics — in English, Dutch, Flemish and French.

Info
Typix screenshot
TYPIX
fun

Typix

Personality assessments that are actually fun: DISC, Enneagram and more, mapped to colour and energy zones.

Get ↓Web ↗CodeInfo
mITyLaundry screenshot
WASH
fun

mITyLaundry

Point your camera at a garment and it sorts the wash for you — AR, entirely in the browser. Sorting socks: still not automated in 2026.

Get ↓Web ↗CodeInfo
mITyLex screenshot
LEX
fun

mITyLex

Language learning built by a developer who got tired of the big apps. Short lessons, clear goals, visible progress.

Get ↓Web ↗CodeInfo
mITyGarden screenshot
GARDEN
fun

mITyGarden

An AI garden design studio. Move the pool with a prompt, not a shovel.

Get ↓Web ↗CodeInfo
SpriteLab screenshot
NEW
SPRITE
lab

SpriteLab

A browser-based pixel-art editor with an AI generator bolted on. Describe a character, get an editable sprite pack — frames, hitboxes and all.

Get ↓CodeInfo
Scrum Programming Language screenshot
SPL
lab

Scrum Programming Language

An intentional programming language: you write ceremonies, it compiles to Java.

Get ↓CodeInfo
LEVEL 02 THE BOOKSTORE

Books, printed & kindled

Reimagined classics and picture books the whole family can pretend to understand. Paperback & Kindle on Amazon.

NEW Cover of Nel springt erin!
Nel springt erin!

Van Bruegel tot Matisse — twaalf meesterwerken voor kleine kijkers. Een ondeugende kat springt een schilderij in, en twee kinderen duiken erachteraan.

Buy on Amazon
NEW Cover of Felix Jumps In!
Felix Jumps In!

From Bruegel to Matisse — twelve masterpieces for little viewers. A mischievous cat leaps into a painting and two children dive in after her.

Buy on Amazon
NEW Cover of Filou saute dans le tableau !
Filou saute dans le tableau !

De Bruegel à Matisse — douze chefs-d'œuvre pour petits curieux. Un chat espiègle saute dans un tableau, deux enfants plongent à sa suite.

Buy on Amazon
NEW Cover of Mimi springt ins Bild!
Mimi springt ins Bild!

Von Bruegel bis Matisse — zwölf Meisterwerke für kleine Betrachter. Eine freche Katze springt in ein Gemälde, zwei Kinder hinterher.

Buy on Amazon
Coming soon
Reimagining Series
In the oven
Reimagining Series

Iconic covers, respectfully reinterpreted and gently roasted. The lab is printing faster than the shelves fill.

Buy on Amazon
LEVEL 03 THE STAGE

Talks & conferences

All 14 talks →
2026
Learning World Tour Conference
Outcoded by our kids: it took us 20 years… they needed 20 prompts
8 June 2026 Online
dotnetZuid Meetup
Outcoded by our kids: it took us 20 years… they needed 20 prompts
29 May 2026 Netherlands with Bart Wullems Details ↗
The Future Of the SDLC Conference
Rethinking the SDLC in an AI-first world
5 May 2026 Munich, Germany
Devoxx FR 2026 Conference
Outcoded by Our Kids : Il nous a fallu 20 ans… ils ont eu besoin de 20 prompts !
22–24 April 2026 Paris, France with Bart Wullems Details ↗
10 more talks →
LEVEL 04 FIELD NOTES

Latest from the blog

All posts →
AI · SDLC
Write the brief, not the prompts
Development
Ghosts in the Machine: I built a haunted IT sim by inviting a ghost in
AI · Music
mITyStudio — I can't (or hardly) play music. So I built something that can.
Development
When a cat makes you publish you're first picture book
AI · Architecture
The Workflow Is the New Unit of Software Delivery
GenAI · Music
PiBeat: From Sonic Pi and MusicAgent to a New Live-Coding IDE
AI · Electron
LoveFlix 2.0 — Or How I Turned Explosions into Romance (Again)
AI · Development
A Guitar Hero Controller Is Still a Guitar (If You Treat It Like One)
LEVEL 05 SPRINT ZERO

A language that compiles ceremonies

Scrummy, the SCRUM language mascot
programming by intent · compiles to Java
Scrum Programming Language
A real language where you code entirely in ceremonies — sprint goals, epics, user stories. Yes, really. Sprint zero compiles. Say hello to Scrummy, the language’s mascot.
Explore →
what it is

SCRUM is a programming language I designed and built myself. Not a framework, not a DSL bolted onto something else — an actual language with its own compiler. You write the ceremonies you already argue about in stand-up, and it compiles them to deterministic Java. The AI runs at compile time, not at runtime, so the binary you ship behaves the same every single run.

hello-world.scrum 
#SPRINTGOAL Deliver our first Scrum program

EPIC "SampleStories"

    USER STORY "HelloWorld"

        #REVIEW Our first Scrum Program
        SAY "Hello world!"

    END OF STORY

END OF EPIC
the ceremonies are the syntax
intent.scrum 
EPIC "SampleStories"

    USER STORY "Greeting"

        #INTENT
        Display a friendly greeting to the user.
        #END INTENT

    END OF STORY

END OF EPIC
When SCRUM encounters an #INTENT block, the compiler interprets it during compilation. AI may assist in translating intent into explicit logic, but the result is plain Java. There is no AI dependency at runtime — execution remains deterministic and JVM-based.
LEVEL 06 THE ARTIST

mITy.John, but make it sound

Songs composed with a suspicious amount of AI and a Raspberry Pi that never asked for any of this. Press play, judge gently.

Spotify ↗ SoundCloud ↗ About the artist
LEVEL 07 THE DIG

Retro-IT, one square at a time

Field finds from computing's past, posted daily-ish.

@mity.john →
Flash & ActionScript once made the web move. Before HTML5 became the default answer to everything, Flash was everywhere. Animations. Browser games. Interactive menus. Cartoons. E-learning. Tiny loading bars that somehow felt like an event. Flash started life in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator. Later that year, Macromedia acquired it and renamed it Flash. Then came the scripting. First simple actions. Then ActionScript. Then ActionScript 2.0. Then ActionScript 3.0, where Flash stopped being “j#FlashRubber duck debugging sounds ridiculous. And that is exactly why it works. The idea is simple: you explain your code, line by line, to a rubber duck. The duck says nothing. The duck judges nothing. The duck has no sprint planning after this. But while explaining the problem out loud, something strange happens. Your brain slows down. Your assumptions become visible. That vague “it should work” turns into actual logic. And suddenly you hear it: “Wait… why am I passing null there?” “Why did #RubberDuckDebuggingCurly braces feel so normal today that we barely notice them. { code lives here } But before C made them famous, **BCPL** was already putting code in braces. BCPL stands for **Basic Combined Programming Language**. A wonderfully practical name for a wonderfully practical language. It was designed by Martin Richards in the 1960s as a simpler descendant of CPL, focused on portability, compiler writing and systems programming. Not exactly a language built for hype. More like: “Can we make t#BCPLBefore objects were cool, Simula already had classes. Simula sounds almost too obvious. And that is because it was. The name comes from SIMUlation LAnguage: a language created to model and simulate systems, especially discrete-event systems. In the early 1960s, Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard worked on it at the Norwegian Computing Center. The goal was practical: describe systems, events, processes and behaviour in a way computers could actually run. But then something bigger happened. #SimulaXamarin sounds like a mysterious framework from a sci-fi lab. Reality? It was named after a monkey. More precisely: the tamarin monkey. The “T” became an “X”, keeping the playful naming tradition around Ximian, Mono, and the wider .NET ecosystem. And honestly, it fits. Xamarin’s mission was all about movement: one codebase, multiple platforms, iOS and Android, C Sharp and .NET trying to keep everyone in the same tree. Was it perfect? No. Was cross-platform mobile development ever peaceful#XamarinCOBOL didn’t try to sound mysterious. It basically showed up with a job description. In 1959, the people behind COBOL needed a shared language for business data processing. So they named it exactly that: Common Business-Oriented Language. Common: less tied to one machine. Business-oriented: payroll, ledgers, reports, records. Language: readable enough that humans could still recognize what was going on. Not the coolest name in computing. Possibly one of the most honest. And more than 60 yea#COBOLSome programming languages become trendy. Ada became trusted. Built in the early 1980s, named after Ada Lovelace, and designed for systems where “oops, runtime surprise” is not exactly a feature. Ada was created with reliability, strong typing, safety and maintainability in mind. That made it a natural fit for mission-critical domains like defense, avionics, aerospace and space-station software. In 1995, Ada 95 became an international standard: ISO/IEC 8652:1995. Or, in less formal terms: A#Ada🍕🎮 Fun fact: Pac‑Man’s name started with a pizza! In 1980, Namco designer Toru Iwatani was hungry and doodled a pizza with one slice missing; that sketch became our yellow hero. He was first called ‘Puck‑Man’, after the Japanese onomatopoeia “paku paku” (the sound of munching), but for the U.S. release the name was tweaked to ‘Pac‑Man’ to deter mischievous arcade scribblers. Since then he’s been chomping dots and dodging ghosts as an arcade legend. Game over? Never. #PacMan #RetroGaming #Gami#PacMan🤖 Bombe-bastic Engineering! How #Turing Went Full 'Enigma-ineer' 💣💡 Back in WWII, Alan Turing and his team worked tirelessly to break the German #Enigma code. Their tool? The Bombe, an electro-mechanical machine that revolutionized cryptography and gave birth to modern computing. This incredible innovation was a precursor to the very systems we use today, shaping how we think about algorithms, data, and security. It's not just about solving puzzles—it’s about building a future where technol#TuringNothing beats a Sonic Pi(e) 🎧🎼😎 Also checkout: https://github.com/janvanwassenhove/MusicAgent for AI driven song creation (with Sonic Pi)! #sonicpi #ruby #development #programming #programmer #code #coder #java #developer #music #music #livecode #dj #programmerslife💻 #raspberry #composer #digital #javascript #script #scripting #softwaredeveloper #softwareengineer #developer #computer #computerscience #computerhistory #creative #songwriter #songwriting #web #ai #musician#sonicpiThe chronicles of Laravel, the framework, Bootplant & the creator! Where did the framework get his name from… #php #laravel #webdeveloper #webdevelopment #web #programmer #programming #code #framework #coder #coderlife #developer #javascript #digital #webdesign #webdesigner #techie #technology #internet #website #drupal #symfony #mvc #narnia #computer #computerhistory #computerscience #history #historyfacts #java#phpMaking UIs Vue-nique! #vuejs your favourite #web #framework ? #webdeveloper #webdevelopment #webdesigner #programmer #programming #programmerlife #code #coder #codergirl #webdesign #digital #internet #computer #developer #development #fullstackdeveloper #software #softwaredeveloper #computer #computers #computerscience #website #history #javascript #scripting #java #angular #react#vuejs

A new find most days. No algorithm required.

// words to build by
“
Creative
A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. He takes a diverse number of stakeholders, extracts needs, concerns and dreams, then creates a beautiful yet tangible solution loved by the users and the community at large. He creates vessels in which life happens.
Cameron Sinclair
“
Practice
If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get a permission.
Grace Hopper
“
Engaging
Invest in your professional development. Specialize… and team up with colleagues who have different strengths.
Melissa Milloway
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