Dieter Stinglhamber

Makes shit happens since

I write in PHP, JS, HTML and CSS.
I can talk to databases and make servers do stuff.

About me

In a few words:
🧞 Weird, 🧙‍♂️ different, 🤓 quirky, 📢 loud, 🤣 funny.

👨‍💼 I don't know how to act my age. I've never been this old before.

🇧🇪 I'm Belgian, lived in Germany 🇩🇪 for a couple years and somehow landed in sunny south of France 🇫🇷.

💬 I speak both French 🇫🇷, English 🇬🇧 and basic Spanish 🇪🇸.

🧸 I love Disney cartoons and movies. My all-time favorite is Beauty and the Beast 🌹 (with Emma Watson).

🧜 I take "You're weird" as a compliment.

🤡 I can't take myself seriously. I'm a master in the art of self-mockery.

👟 I wear Chuck Taylors (Converse) of different colors: Blue and Yellow at the moment. And I always wear unmatched funky socks, I'm weird like that.

💇‍♂️ I tend to change hairstyle a lot. During the various lockdowns I went from (fake) dreads to a red mohawk, a purple mohawk, then I shaved my head.

🎄 I LOVE Christmas. It's the best time of the year! As soon as arrives I dust off Micheal Bubble Christmas album and enjoy wearing my "Ugly X-Mas sweater".

🏃‍♂️ I used to do sport but now I'm lazy. I mostly ran. On the best days, I used to do about 20 - 30km per week. I ran a semi-marathon and a couple of 20km races. I even attempted a marathon once (Brussels Marathon ) and gave up after 36km. I was close to the finish, I know, but after I could barely walk. I hit that god forsaken wall. I learned that there are things that you can't go unprepared for. But it was fun. I'd like to one day attempt that again. But I will need to train seriously for that.

🛒 I don't like Amazon. I always favor local brick-and-mortar stores and if I need to buy something online I'll go to a smaller, more local store. Amazon will be my very last resort if I exhausted all other possibilities. Recently I started to buy more and more second-hand, especially board games.

🚫 Unnecessary plastic is unnecessary.

🔒 I value my privacy, especially online. I'm only present on Twitter and barely post these days. I'm going to clean my feed at some point. I don't have WhatsApp. I hate the "I have nothing to hide" argument when talking about personal data collection. There's nothing more annoying to me than having to give more data than necessary when registering for a service. I don't like when people use "Google" as a verb. And I'm against voice assistance and IoT that have to be connected to the internet to work.

Video games

I play a lot of video games, too much is you ask my parents. When I was a kid this was my escape. I play mainly on my computer, but I'm also the proud owner of a PS5. I have a PS3 to play to Sing Star, a Wii to play Wii sport with the family. I also have a Switch because I need to be able to play Skyrim on the go or on the toilet 🚽.

My Favorite games are (in no particular order):

  • Dark Souls 1 and 3
  • Demon Souls (PS3 and PS5)
  • Bloodborne
  • Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3
  • Dragon Age: Origins and 2
  • TES5: Skyrim
  • Diablo 3 and 4
  • The Last Of Us: Part I
  • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • A Plague Tale: Innocence and Requiem
  • Spider-man, Spider-man: Miles Morales and Spider-man 2

As you can see I play mostly solo games. I like RPGs and games with good stories. I also like to pretend that I'm good at From Software game.

My kingdom for board games

boardgame shelf
An old picture of what my shelves looked like when I lived in Germany.

I love board games. I've been in the hobby for about now. Proud owner of around 200 games I have transformed part of my living room into a gaming area.

When I was still living in Belgium I used to visit my parents every weekend so I could play Ticket to Ride and Azul with my mom. When I worked for trivago I started to organize weekly meetup to be able to buy and play more games.

During COVID I started to play games remotely with my parents and friends. So here's a list of games that works over video call. Of course, both side need to own the game and some coordination is required:

  • Cartographer
  • Codenames
  • Azul
  • Ticket to Ride
  • Roll Player
  • Carcassonne

There's probably lots of other games that can work but these are the one we played so far.

I also play Dungeons and Dragons. When the very first lockdown started in Germany I just started a campaign with some colleagues. Since I knew the most I took the role of the Dungeon Master. We played a year-long campaign that finishes end of .