Hello, I'm Nico Verbruggen, a software developer from Belgium, who has spent the last decade or so working with lots of PHP and Swift.
You can find my various open source contributions here. Here's a few places to learn more about me and my work:
- If you'd like to read my blog with various thoughts on technical projects
- I am the developer and maintainer of PHP Monitor, which is open source
- I also maintain a curated collection of fonts for e-readers, as well as tooling for patching fonts for Kobo devices
- If you love what I do, you are encouraged to sponsor my work or star my work
Many of my projects are intentionally released under an open source license (MIT or equivalent) since I believe in open ecosystems. You can find links to my social media channels here.
I'm probably best known for this one. A native application written in Swift to make building PHP projects on the Mac a little easier. It started as a GUI companion for Laravel Valet, but it has grown quite beyond that scope at this point.
This project gained some traction in 2021 and following years and partially inspired Laravel Herd, after which it became a little less popular because the official Laravel offering became the default go-to option for new developers.
I still maintain the project and it remains under development because I believe that Homebrew PHP is still the best way to get PHP up and running on your Mac, in line with other development tooling.
As part of curating a personal collection of fonts for e-readers I've done various deep dives into understanding the ins and outs of font rendering on Kobo devices.
I've also worked on turning an existing typeface into Libron, a font reminiscent of Bookerly. This variant originally started as Readerly, which is now retired. and I also maintain some font derivatives like Cartisse and Sourcerer and a tweaked version of EB Garamond.
I've also worked on a bit of an OpenDyslexic case study with various font variants for your reading pleasure.
I created and maintain a few Kobo mods for 4.x software versions:
- NickelHome: give your Kobo a clean homescreen
- NickelTypeFix: fix typography and typesetting
- NickelCoverFix: fallback for cover cache and custom covers
- NickelDissolve: animate page turns on Kobo devices
I also have some tooling for patching fonts to make those fonts render as correctly as possible on Kobo devices running the 4.x firmware. This closely ties into my other various font projects, which are mostly intended for usage on e-reader devices (Kobo, Kindle, Boox, etc.).
I have also built KoboPatch Web UI, the easiest way to patch your Kobo with a preset I maintain or patches distributed via the MobileRead forums. You can also use the website to easily install various mods and KOReader.
There's also some other stuff that I've built that isn't mentioned here that you can explore.
