Ruurtjan Pul's blog
We’ll get to the asterisk. I run Wirewiki.com , a website to inspect internet infrastructure like domain names. It helps people check (historic) DNS records, DNS delegation, email deliverability config, etc. There are a ton of sites that offer this (growing faster than ever thanks to vibe coding), so I need a way to stand out. I picked tool quality / usefulness and UX. The autocomplete is the main…
My side project nslookup.io (a free online dns checker) got out of hand. I quit my job to work full time on it 3 years ago. I've since launched a DNS course (on Black Friday sale right now) for which I've run €21k (about $25k incl. VAT) worth of X ads. Here's everything I've learned about running ads on X. I spent $25k on X ads as an indie dev. X ads can work if you're an indie dev Clearly I…
September 5th, 14:45. An email titled "Traffic spike on nslookup.io" arrives. I'm excited to find out what caused the increase in visitors on my site. It won't be long before I notice that all additional traffic comes from the UK. It started suddenly, and didn't seem to have any clear cause. I remembered seeing a couple of tweets a couple of weeks ago, about bot traffic coming from specific…
My list of side projects grew ever larger. The list of abandoned, semifinished projects did so too. That's when I decided to focus on a single side project for a longer period of time. But which one? An indecisive developer. Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo There are many reasons to start a side project. To learn a new technology, to build a portfolio, because you need it yourself, or maybe just for…
I quit my job. I'm now unemployed. It feels great to finally be able to write this blog post. I remember daydreaming about making an aggregation site for flash games back when I was 10 years old. Teaching myself rudimentary HTML and CSS, I managed to build a page with tables and iframes. My former colleagues gave me these awesome socks as a goodbye present It wouldn't be until I went to university…
Thanks to Tom de Ruijter, Steven Reitsma and Laurens Koppenol for proof reading this post. While playing Factorio the other day, I was struck by the many similarities with Apache Kafka . If you aren’t familiar with them: Factorio is an open-world RTS where you build and optimize supply chains in order to launch a satellite and restore communications with your home planet, and Kafka is a…
I recently came across 3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra YouTube playlist. As the title implies, it covers the basics of linear algebra. Instead of focusing on the math though, it lays down a foundation that gives you a visual intuition that helps you reason about it. I would highly recommend this if you've never really grasped linear algebra that you've been taught in university, or if…