About
I came to horticulture through software, and now do a fair amount of both.
Software came first, and never stopped: around fifteen years of it, and still a large part of what I do. PHP first, then JavaScript and TypeScript, then Python once machine learning turned into something I needed rather than something I was reading about.
Horticulture came later, and properly: horticultural education, then professional work in strawberry production. Consulting for commercial growers, greenhouse and growing-system projects, and crops in several countries. Strawberries are still where most of my time goes: propagation, crop planning, nutrition and irrigation, and the weekly decisions that decide how a season turns out.
The two sides stopped being separate somewhere along the way. What I build now comes out of problems I ran into while growing: computer vision to measure how a crop is actually developing, software for greenhouse design and nutrition, and calculations that were otherwise living in spreadsheets and memory.
What I like about horticulture is that it argues back. A model is either useful in the greenhouse or it is not, and the crop tells you which within a season. That keeps the software honest.
Commercial consulting and technology work runs through Vaerens. This site is the broader picture: the projects and the things I am still working out.