About me

I'm Manuel van Leeuwen. I'm 21 years old and based in the Netherlands. In my free time, I love playing table tennis, hanging out with friends, and of course coding.

I started coding in 2020 by creating Discord bots. I had almost no programming experience, and I watched some YouTube videos with explanation. Through building Discord bots, I learned JavaScript, Node.js, and eventually TypeScript. I also dived into the library (Discord.js), and it really helped me to think at code-level. Later, I also created some small Python projects, mainly for school.

Recently, I've started learning Laravel through its bootcamp project Chirper. I had some basic PHP knowledge, but I never really used it because I preferred JavaScript. I also had minimal experience with creating websites. I've created some very basic sites to learn some React, but never more than that. Through Laravel, I've experienced its true potential. I like Laravel because it makes it very simple to create a full-stack website. It includes authentication, migrations, validation, queues and so much more you don't have to worry about.I also find Blade very intuitive, it's as simple as it can be to create styles or components.

A part of the reason I was never really into building websites, and that I never finished one, is that I didn't like having to add design to it. I never liked writing CSS, but when I started following the Laravel bootcamp, I learned about Tailwind CSS. I like it much more, mainly because there is no need to switch from Blade to CSS, but you just add the style class in every single element. It's a lot easier now to experiment with a different style in a single element. Every element needs its own style class, but it's very easy to reuse styles throughout a project. It's dark class is also very useful for adding dark mode. With all this, Tailwind CSS has made it much less pain for me to write CSS.