Intro

Hi! I'm bert hubert, and I am an entrepreneur & software developer. I sometimes contribute to science, I care a lot about Europe 🇪🇺, innovation, climate, biology & health. I'm a former shareholder of Open-Xchange, the parent company of PowerDNS which I founded in 1999. In 2020, I joined a government oversight board, which I have since left. These days I am a (very) part-time technical advisor at various government departments, including the Dutch Electoral Council. Furthermore, I write articles, some of which have been published by places like the IETF, IEEE, RIPE, APNIC, the Swedish Electronics Standardisation Institute, but also by newspapers/magazines like Nature Scientific Data, De Volkskrant, Nederlands Dagblad, Villamedia, De Ingenieur, Knack, dnip.ch and others. A bit more about me and what I (want to) do can be found here.

By popular demand (really), I now also have a newsletter in English, and also een nieuwsbrief in het Nederlands. On those pages you can also subscribe to some further more dedicated lists.

I can be contacted via email on bert@hubertnet.nl or on Mastodon: @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social. If you don't receive a timely reply, do check your spam folder (sadly). Please try to send a brief message - I get a lot of email these days!

My (live) data and software projects:

• tkconv: Ontsluit de Tweede Kamer open data via een aantrekkelijke website & een goed bruikbare SQLite database
• Trifecta: simple image sharing website/service
• bagconv: software to make the official Dutch building & addresses database far more accessible, including ready to use CSV files and an online service.
• Galmon.eu: GPS/Galileo/GNSS monitoring project. Live dashboard: galmon.eu.
• Nlelec, live plots of Dutch (renewable) electricity consumption & imports & exports.
• SkewDB: an open database of GC and other microbial skews (Video from presentation at the Scientific Spring Meeting KNVM / NVMM 2022).

Some notable projects, publications & presentations:

• Hello Deep Learning, a from-scratch introduction to deep learning, that builds a program that learns how to read handwritten letters.
• Googerteller/Tracker Beeper. Media: Radio 1 Belgium, RTL Nieuws, 9To5Google.
• MCH2022 presentations "Hacking the genome: how does it work, and should we be?" and "How do GPS/Galileo really work & how the galmon.eu project monitors all navigation satellites" (NEW!)
• Podcast Stuurloos, Waarom je nerdfluisteraars nodig hebt bij de overheid, Kustaw Bessems / Volkskrant.
• Er zijn te weinig nerdfluisteraars bij bedrijven en overheden, vindt ict-expert Bert Hubert, Kustaw Bessems / Volkskrant.
• Hackparadijs Nederland, De Balie. Met Sanne Maasakkers, Michiel Steltman en Lokke Moerel.
• The Technology of Life, a book I am writing!
• SkewDB, a comprehensive database of GC and 10 other skews for over 30,000 chromosomes and plasmids, Nature Scientific Data, 2022
• A fun podcast with SPRIND, Germany's Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, also covering some of my background.
• Hoe kwetsbaar Europa is, leer je van een broodrooster, artikel in De Correspondent over technische kennis en outsourcing.
• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
• RFC 5452: Measures for Making DNS More Resilient against Forged Answers
• 5G: The outsourced elephant in the room
• GPS, Galileo & More: How do they work & what happened during the big outage?
• Modern C++ for C Programmers: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
• Hello DNS: an introduction to DNS, including reference implementations
• Spectre & Meltdown: tapping into a CPU's subconscious thoughts
• DNA: The code of life (Blog, with links to two hours of video)
• '(Don’t) drop the hint: communicating with technical people'
• Optimizing optimizing: some insights that led to a 400% speedup of PowerDNS
• How about some actual innovation: Inventing the transistor and landing a nuclear robot on Mars
• Interview at Startup Grind Rotterdam, on business, startups and innovation (with video)
• 'Escaping the data center - tales from a recovering manager', NLNOG Day 2015. Video, slides

Note: All recent publications/posts can be found here.

You can find more in the sections on linked from the top of this page.

Possibly relevant: Linkedin, Mastodon, Dutch Mastodon, BlueSky (reluctantly), Old blog, GitHub 1, GitHub 2, Google Scholar, ORCiD. I am no longer on Twitter.

Some older links can only be found on the old version of this page.