Portfolio

A selection of what I've built and what I write about. Click through for the details of a project or an article.

projects.json

In development

Shipwright Shore

A blocky survival game with a way out: the ship you build yourself. For phone and desktop, fully offline, with procedurally generated worlds, textures and music.

YLVA Yoga & Coaching

A custom WordPress site for a yoga and coaching practice, built as a Gutenberg block theme on Bedrock. Two of my own plugins underneath: Pulse for GDPR-proof analytics and Aura for SEO and GEO.

In development

Custom CRM & planning tool

An internal, tailor-made CRM and planning tool for a company in the central Netherlands that specializes in professional makeup and hairstyling.

Privacy-first, cookieless visitor statistics that live entirely inside WordPress. Insight into visitors, top pages, sources, journeys and clicks without external trackers, without a cookie banner, without fingerprinting and without data ever leaving your server.

Aura SEO & GEO

AI-assisted SEO and GEO plugin for modern WordPress 7+ sites. Generates meta content with Claude or OpenAI, builds a coherent JSON-LD entity graph and scores every page on both classic SEO and generative engine optimization.

Mithril

Open source PWA start page for technical team leads: tasks, follow-ups, meetings, notes and per-member context, with Office 365 and Jira integration, self-hosted transcription and AI extraction of action items.

articles.json

A game that started as a joke

Nov 12, 2026

Out of things to watch on Netflix, and kids playing Minecraft. What started as a joke became Shipwright Shore: a survival game I build as a backend developer, with AI on the oars and myself at the helm.

Why JSON-LD is still needed, even now that AI reads text itself

Aug 3, 2026

A language model reads your page just fine without schema, so why still use JSON-LD? Because the systems that really matter don't want to run a model on billions of pages; they parse deterministically. The gain isn't that AI can't read it otherwise, it's that you don't need AI for it.

The newest stack is rarely the best choice

Jul 27, 2026

Picking the newest framework feels like craftsmanship, but it's often résumé-driven development, and the customer gets the bill years later. Why boring, proven tools beat the stack of the season, and when new is the right call after all.

The sense and nonsense of SEO and GEO tools

Jul 20, 2026

GEO isn't hype, but most of the tools around it are. How to tell the useful SEO and GEO tools from the useless ones as a business owner, without being sold a dashboard that peddles a number instead of a result.

Why I work on a subscription basis, and why 'done' doesn't exist

Jul 13, 2026

Almost every quote request starts with "what does it cost to have this built?". That question assumes something that isn't true: that software is done one day. Why a fixed monthly price aligns interests, and when a project price fits better after all.

Isolate what you don't trust: the architecture behind Pulse and Aura

Jul 7, 2026

Two WordPress plugins I built myself: a cookieless analytics tool and an AI-driven SEO/GEO plugin. Different goals, same principle: put the unpredictable part behind a tight, tested boundary.

AI in your development process, not in your product

Apr 15, 2026

"Do you do anything with AI?" is really two questions. Where AI earns its keep is in how you build software; in what ships to the customer I'm a lot more careful. Why that distinction saves money and risk.

legal.json

{
  "company_name": "Bas de Kort",
  "legal_form": "sole proprietorship",
  "trade_names": ["Bas de Kort", "LengthOfRope"],
  "address": "Kerkeakker 3, 6674 EM Herveld, NL",
  "chamber_of_commerce": "42038027",
  "vat_id": "NL004476145B32",
  "contact": { "form": "basdekort.nl/en/contact", "telephone": "+31628456862" },
  "documents": [ "privacy", "terms and conditions", "data processing agreement" ]
}