Hi there,

My name is Tom Schoonjans.

Some quick facts about me:

  • Born in Anderlecht (Belgium) on March 26, 1982
  • Studied chemistry (MSc) at Ghent University
  • Did a PhD on X-ray Fluorescence from October 2006 to January 2012 at the same university, followed by a short post-doc there as well
  • Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sassari (Sardinia, Italy) from September 2012 to September 2014.
  • Post-doctoral researcher at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (Berlin, Germany) from October 2014 to October 2015
  • Data analysis scientist/software scientist at the Diamond Light Source (Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) from October 2015 to March 2020.
  • Currently employed as a Research Software Engineer for HPC and Cloud at the Rosalind Franklin Institute
  • I live in Oxford, United Kingdom, with my wife Niloufer and our son Sam.

I have a strong passion for coding, which I developed during my PhD research. My favorite languages are C and Fortran, although I also have some skill in C++, Java, Perl, IDL and Python. Most of my development occurs on a Mac, which comes with a collection of virtual machines, allowing me to produce releases of my software for all major platforms. Nowadays I spend most of my time setting up infrastructure to support research at my institute, using OpenStack, AWS, Ansible, Vagrant, Docker, Singularity etc., but I still code a lot. My main software project currently is the RFI-File-Monitor.

In the past I have worked a lot on xraylib, XMI-MSIM and XRMC, all of which are directly connected to my (previous) scientific research: Monte Carlo simulations of interactions of X-ray photons with matter. If you happen to be involved in this field of research as well, there’s a good chance you may find them interesting, so feel free to check them out.

Apart from these, I am also a minor contributor to two other projects FGSL, Fortran bindings to the GNU scientific library, and GtkExtra, a useful set of widgets for creating GUI’s for GTK+. I am also maintaining installers of the Gtk+ 64-bit runtime environment for Windows, with releases for both Gtk+2 and Gtk+3.

In 2015 I started a project for scientific plotting in Gtkmm3 called Gtkmm-PLplot. I also have a small library featuring random number generators and distributions for C and Fortran called easyRNG, using an API based on the GNU Scientific Library.

It goes without saying that all these projects are open-source and freely available!

I am also a regular contributor to Homebrew and Conda-Forge.

Most of these projects are maintained during my free time, so if you would ever find them useful, or you are really happy with the personal support I gave you, or even if you just think I am nice guy who deserves a free beer, feel free to send me a donation on my PayPal account, or sponsor me on Github.

I created this blog with the goal of sharing some of the more interesting problems I come across during my coding streaks, wherever I can with solutions.

Hope you may find this blog interesting. Don’t hesitate to drop a comment, that would be greatly appreciated.