https://meertens.dev/blog/ Writing about AI, side projects, and things I find interesting. en Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:04:07 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/three-months-of-agentic-coding/ https://meertens.dev/blog/three-months-of-agentic-coding/ Last month I wrote my experience with AI-generated coding on this blog. I got a lot of positive feedback, so I created another chart for my work up till this month and wrote down the thoughts I had. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/tokidoki-japanese-grammar/ https://meertens.dev/blog/tokidoki-japanese-grammar/ I am trying to learn Japanese. This is extremely hard, especially the grammar. I now made a tool to help you practice! Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/two-months-as-a-vibe-coder/ https://meertens.dev/blog/two-months-as-a-vibe-coder/ The last two months my work completely changed. My job changed from thinking long and hard about problems and coming up with the best few code to solve this, to full-on talking in English to my... Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/gpt-stemt-d66-groenlinks-pvda/ https://meertens.dev/blog/gpt-stemt-d66-groenlinks-pvda/ De verkiezingen komen eraan, en dus zijn er weer meerdere kieswijzers online. Nu we allemaal liever praten met ChatGPT in plaats van met onze vrienden in discussie gaan vroeg ik me af: wat zou... Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-pikachu-tesla-coil/ https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-pikachu-tesla-coil/ This week I made a new project: a Tesla-coil powered Pikachu It’s essentially a 3D printed pikachu which emits sparks. What’s cool about it is that I can also play the pokemon theme tune through it... Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/being-a-top-programming-voice-on-linkedin/ https://meertens.dev/blog/being-a-top-programming-voice-on-linkedin/ Looks like LinkedIn awarded me a “Top Programming Voice” badge. Although I am always quite vocal about the field of programming and machine learning I earned this badge by copy-pasting a single quote: Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/dataset-in-a-day/ https://meertens.dev/blog/dataset-in-a-day/ How to efficiently create a machine learning dataset in a day — originally published on the Bumble Tech blog. Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/point-and-snap-for-my-smart-home/ https://meertens.dev/blog/point-and-snap-for-my-smart-home/ Having smart devices in your home is fun, but turning them off is still a hassle. Taking an app, talking to Alexa, or pressing a button all takes too much time. Why can’t we in 2022 just point at a... Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/edge-annotationz-challenge/ https://meertens.dev/blog/edge-annotationz-challenge/ How the Kognic team won the Edge AnnotationZ challenge — originally published on the Kognic blog. Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/unit-testing-perception-system/ https://meertens.dev/blog/unit-testing-perception-system/ How to apply unit testing principles to perception systems in autonomous driving — originally published on the Kognic blog. Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/analysing-my-swim-stroke/ https://meertens.dev/blog/analysing-my-swim-stroke/ Recently I tried to improve my swimming skills. I’m trying to get better at longer distances, swimming with less effort, and going a bit faster. In some videos they talked about optimising the amount... Sun, 06 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/landing-the-perseverance-rover-on-mars/ https://meertens.dev/blog/landing-the-perseverance-rover-on-mars/ This week the perseverance rover landed on mars A big congratulations for everyone at NASA who made this possible It’s a stunning engineering feat which I followed closely on Youtube. Something I... Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/sending-a-neural-network-to-the-moon/ https://meertens.dev/blog/sending-a-neural-network-to-the-moon/ Sending a neural network to the moon Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/using-emojis-in-mathematical-notation/ https://meertens.dev/blog/using-emojis-in-mathematical-notation/ Math is hard to understand. Whenever I read technical documents I skip the mathematical equations. When I do read them I have to go over them multiple times to fully finally what the author meant. A... Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-jack-skellington-mask/ https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-jack-skellington-mask/ This week it’s Halloween Time to dress up as something scary I decided that I wanted to make the mask of Jack Skellington, from “The Nightmare before... Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-remote-controlled-ikea-table-2/ https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-remote-controlled-ikea-table-2/ Inspired by the show Pat and Mat (Buurman en Buurman in the Netherlands) I decided to build a remote controllable IKEA table. For this project I got help from my friend Ilya, with whom we conducted... Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/visualising-lidar-and-radar-in-virtual-reality/ https://meertens.dev/blog/visualising-lidar-and-radar-in-virtual-reality/ Last week someone pointed out the Astyx dataset to me. So far I only visualised lidar data in my virtual reality tool immersivepoints.com, so I was interested in seeing... Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/microbe-obliterator-mo-from-wall-e-on-a-mopping-robot/ https://meertens.dev/blog/microbe-obliterator-mo-from-wall-e-on-a-mopping-robot/ My favourite character in the Disney Pixar movie WALL-E is M-O. A while ago I bought a iRobot mopping robot, which always reminded me of Mo. This week I decided to try to pimp up my robot by actually... Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/saturn-v/ https://meertens.dev/blog/saturn-v/ I absolutely love everything related to space When decorating our apartment we decided to add a little ‘space corner’ in the hallway for all space related decoration. One thing we bought for this is... Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/visualising-the-pandaset-labels/ https://meertens.dev/blog/visualising-the-pandaset-labels/ In May 2020 Scale released their open Autonomous Driving dataset called Pandaset. Of course this is a great opportunity to inspect their data in Virtual Reality with... Sun, 24 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-cupcake-robot/ https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-cupcake-robot/ Currently, as the corona crisis is causing heavy lockdowns, people have to keep a social distance. This made it difficult to celebrate special events, so as a challenge I decided to try to make a... Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/looking-back-at-the-first-ai-meet-vr-event/ https://meertens.dev/blog/looking-back-at-the-first-ai-meet-vr-event/ On May 1st 2020 I organised the first AI Meet VR event in Mozilla Hubs. I started organising it two weeks ago to see how a virtual get-together would look and feel like. After experiencing it, I have... Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/visualise-embeddings-in-virtual-reality/ https://meertens.dev/blog/visualise-embeddings-in-virtual-reality/ When working with data and neural networks it’s good to know whether similar data is close together. This could be either in the original space of the data or in a deep layer of a neural network. In... Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/immersive-points-a-virtual-reality-point-cloud-visualisation-tool/ https://meertens.dev/blog/immersive-points-a-virtual-reality-point-cloud-visualisation-tool/ A couple of years ago I made a visualization tool for the Google Cardboard that could show you a brain by looking around(../brain-visualisation/index.html). The two big... Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/my-new-years-resolution-in-super-resolution/ https://meertens.dev/blog/my-new-years-resolution-in-super-resolution/ A new year is approaching, which means that it’s time for everybody to think about new-years resolutions to improve your life. An ideal moment to take your new-years resolution and turn it into a... Sun, 15 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/3d-printed-vehicle-coordinate-system/ https://meertens.dev/blog/3d-printed-vehicle-coordinate-system/ If you work with self-driving cars you probably know about the vehicle coordinate system (also known as ISO 8855). This coordinate system is described extensively... Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/scale-your-deep-learning-on-the-aws-platform-using-horovod/ https://meertens.dev/blog/scale-your-deep-learning-on-the-aws-platform-using-horovod/ “The more you buy, the more you save”. These are words NVIDIAs CEO Jensen Huang always utters at NVIDIAs GTC conference series. What he refers to is that in machine learning there are often many... Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/showing-kids-what-neural-networks-can-detect/ https://meertens.dev/blog/showing-kids-what-neural-networks-can-detect/ Last week the company I work for, Autonomous Intelligent Driving, held an open day for children. I showed the kids an object detector to teach kids what Artificial Intelligence can detect. Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/working-self-driving-car-company/ https://meertens.dev/blog/working-self-driving-car-company/ In January I have been a machine learning engineer at Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) for exactly a year To summarize for myself what I learned, and to inspire others, I... Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/infoq-alexa-skill/ https://meertens.dev/blog/infoq-alexa-skill/ A while ago I started exploring the current state of voice interfaces and smart home technology. One particular interesting smart home application is Amazon’s Alexa. It’s a device with a speaker... Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/worlds-longest-palindrome/ https://meertens.dev/blog/worlds-longest-palindrome/ In honor of the 20th of February, 2002, a palindromic date, Peter Norvig designed his worlds longest unique palindromic sentence of 21,012 words. With a new... Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/painting-by-prime-number/ https://meertens.dev/blog/painting-by-prime-number/ Two weeks ago I stumbled upon the concept of prime portraits. In short, prime portraits are pictures in which each color is assigned a... Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/managing-budget-excel-machine-learning/ https://meertens.dev/blog/managing-budget-excel-machine-learning/ A little over a year ago my girlfriend Lisette and I moved in together. A big part of living together was getting used to managing a budget, and knowing where our money went. Lisette made one of the... Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/autonomous-green-wave/ https://meertens.dev/blog/autonomous-green-wave/ This weekend we got the second place in the Hack the Road Hackathon with our idea to let connected vehicles lead other vehicles through a “green wave”. As there will be a long period in which smart... Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/tradr-siks-summerschool-2017/ https://meertens.dev/blog/tradr-siks-summerschool-2017/ A few weeks ago I gave an introductory course to reinforcement learning with the OpenAI Gym environment. As content, I used the writeups I already put on my site several weeks... Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/detecting-bats-recognising-sound-tensorflow/ https://meertens.dev/blog/detecting-bats-recognising-sound-tensorflow/ Last week I discovered that there are bats behind my appartment. I immediately grabbed my “bat detector”: a device that converts the ultrasound signals bats use to echolocate from an inaudible... Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/openai-gym-part-3-playing-space-invaders-deep-reinforcement-learning/ https://meertens.dev/blog/openai-gym-part-3-playing-space-invaders-deep-reinforcement-learning/ In part 1 we got to know the openAI Gym environment(../getting-started-openai-gym/index.html), and in part 2 we explored deep... Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/introduction-openai-gym-part-2-building-deep-q-network/ https://meertens.dev/blog/introduction-openai-gym-part-2-building-deep-q-network/ In part 1 we used a random search algorithm to “solve” the cartpole environment. This time we are going to take things to the next level and implement a deep q-network.The OpenAI gym environment is... Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/getting-started-openai-gym/ https://meertens.dev/blog/getting-started-openai-gym/ The OpenAI gym environment is one of the most fun ways to learn more about machine learning. Especially reinforcement learning and neural networks can be applied perfectly to the benchmark and Atari... Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/zalando-python-client/ https://meertens.dev/blog/zalando-python-client/ The Zalando python client Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/simple-introduction-to-tensorboard-embedding-visualisation/ https://meertens.dev/blog/simple-introduction-to-tensorboard-embedding-visualisation/ Visualising embeddings is a powerful technique It helps you understand what your algorithm learned, and if this is what you expected it to learn. Embedding visualisation is a standard feature in... Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/laser-engraving-wine-box/ https://meertens.dev/blog/laser-engraving-wine-box/ This weekend my dad turns 63. This year I created a very personal gift for him: a laser engraved wine box. Sat, 15 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/learned-developing-neural-voting-advice-application/ https://meertens.dev/blog/learned-developing-neural-voting-advice-application/ Two weeks ago I put the neural voting advice application online (../neural-voting-advice-application/index.html). In this post, I look back at two aspects: the end-user aspect... Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/stemwijzer-met-kunstmatige-intelligentie/ https://meertens.dev/blog/stemwijzer-met-kunstmatige-intelligentie/ Volgende week zijn er verkiezingen in Nederland. Met 28 partijen is dit een lastige keuze. Vaak orienteren mensen zich door een stemwijzer in te vullen. Door de 30 belangrijkste vragen van het moment... Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/neural-voting-advice-application/ https://meertens.dev/blog/neural-voting-advice-application/ Next week the Netherlands will hold elections to choose who is going to represent the people in the house of representatives. There are 28 political parties participating, although there are 10 ‘big’... Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/watching-tensorflow-dev-summit-2017-livestream/ https://meertens.dev/blog/watching-tensorflow-dev-summit-2017-livestream/ Last night Tensorflow held the Dev Summit 2017. Although it was in California, they streamed all talks live through Youtube... Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/visiting-clin-2017-conference-computational-linguistics-netherlands/ https://meertens.dev/blog/visiting-clin-2017-conference-computational-linguistics-netherlands/ On 9 and 10 February, the 2017 edition of CLIN (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands) was held. As I work a lot with neural machine translation, automatic post editing, and translation... Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/photorealistic-neural-network-gameboy/ https://meertens.dev/blog/photorealistic-neural-network-gameboy/ (images/2017/02/mygameboy.jpg) In 1998 Nintendo released the Gameboy Camera. With this camera, it was possible to take images in a resolution of... Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-neural-machine-translation-to-gala-members/ https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-neural-machine-translation-to-gala-members/ Yesterday I presented an introduction to neural networks to GALA members: the Globalization and Localization Association. With the recent breakthrough of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) more and... Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/old-spelling-to-new-spelling-with-tensorflow/ https://meertens.dev/blog/old-spelling-to-new-spelling-with-tensorflow/ On February 10 2017 the 27th edition of the Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands conference will be held in Leuven. As part of this conference they organise a “shared task”. This year, this... Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/my-top-3-machine-learning-in-2016/ https://meertens.dev/blog/my-top-3-machine-learning-in-2016/ The year 2017 is starting tomorrow, let’s look back at what happened in machine learning last year. In this blogpost I will post my personal top 3 of developments in Artificial Intelligence this year. Sat, 31 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/advent-of-codetesting-2016/ https://meertens.dev/blog/advent-of-codetesting-2016/ This year I participated in the “Advent of Code” challenge. Every day two small programming questions were posted on adventofcode.com that (depending on your skill) could be... Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/faster-writing-and-testing-machine-learning-applications/ https://meertens.dev/blog/faster-writing-and-testing-machine-learning-applications/ Today I discovered a great thing for people with two computers (development and training). In my case, my normal work-pc is a mediocre Windows computer (company policy) that can’t handle deep... Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/looking-back-at-my-first-datathon/ https://meertens.dev/blog/looking-back-at-my-first-datathon/ In March last year I participated with a team of AI students in the first datathon (hackathon focussed on machine learning) in the Netherlands. The challenge during this hackathon was making the most... Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-smart-iot-bed/ https://meertens.dev/blog/building-a-smart-iot-bed/ Recently I finished a cool electronics project: internet connected lights under my bed. In three steps I guide you from project to project, each time adding functionality to what we made. Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-googles-zero-shot-translation/ https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-googles-zero-shot-translation/ (images/2016/11/translationgame2-04.png)Google announced that it can do a zero-shot translation from Korean to Japanese and from Japanese to Korean. They do... Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-googles-neural-machine-translation-paper/ https://meertens.dev/blog/explaining-googles-neural-machine-translation-paper/ Google recently published the paper “Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation”: < As I got a lot of... Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/ineffective-sorts-tensorflowsort/ https://meertens.dev/blog/ineffective-sorts-tensorflowsort/ Recently sequential neural networks have been gaining popularity. To explore what they were capable of I decided to create the ineffective sorting algorithm (< Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/calculating-how-to-split-your-bills/ https://meertens.dev/blog/calculating-how-to-split-your-bills/ Dutch people are known for splitting their bills. When frequently eating with the same group this could normally lead to an awkward situation, where everybody has to pay everybody a little bit. Most... Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/connection-requests-strangers-linkedin-accepting-right-way/ https://meertens.dev/blog/connection-requests-strangers-linkedin-accepting-right-way/ Many people talked with me about this dilemma: do you accept connection requests from strangers? Accepting the invite could be a foot in the door in the future, even if you don’t know this person.... Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/brain-visualisation/ https://meertens.dev/blog/brain-visualisation/ During a project in which I created partitions in the brain there was no simple way to visualise my data. When asking a teacher the best method apparently was: try to write a Matlab script. To help... Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://meertens.dev/blog/human-input-when-reinforcement-learning/ https://meertens.dev/blog/human-input-when-reinforcement-learning/ Using human input can be valuable for reinforcement learning. Imagine the difference between having to learn something yourself, and having a mentor hold your hand while showing you how a task is... Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000