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, mainly because I didn't like having to basically build my own authentication and routers and having to write all the CSS to make it look acceptable. That's why I love Laravel, combined with Blade and Tailwind CSS. It's very straightforward, easy to add PHP via Blade and to customize single elements via Tailwind, without the need to navigate to a CSS file all the time. It also includes authentication, migrations, validation, queues and so much that's almost ready to use out of the box.