If you’ve been reading my recent posts, you know I’ve been experimenting a lot with 360-degree cameras. After successfully mapping out a few forgotten historical sites and wrestling with the backend of Google Maps, it finally hit me: I now know exactly what it takes to create, process, and publish high-quality 360° footage to Google Street View.

Since I’ve already launched my production house to bring stories to life, I want to expand that ecosystem. I’m thinking about launching a dedicated B2B 360° video branch focused specifically on Real Estate and Museums/Cultural Spaces.

Because I love history, the idea of helping spaces open up their doors to the digital world gets me genuinely excited. But before I go all-in buying more specialized rigging, I wanted to do a little market research and put out a vibe check.

Here is the blueprint of what this new branch will offer:

What We Offer: Virtual Walkthroughs & Blue Lines

We aren't just dropping a camera in the middle of a room and clicking record. We are offering two distinct digital pipelines depending on what a property or venue needs:

1. Custom Interactive Websites

If you run a real estate agency, a boutique hotel, or an indoor museum, we can build a completely custom, self-hosted website for your space. Users will be able to smoothly walk through the property, click on interactive hotspots for more information, and experience the venue as if they were standing right there.

2. Google Street View "Blue Lines"

For open public spaces—like open-air art museums, historical parks, botanical gardens, or massive event venues—this is where the real marketing magic happens. We will map your entire location and upload it directly to Google Maps as an official "Blue Line."

Why This Is a Game-Changer for Open Spaces

If you operate a venue that relies on foot traffic, giving people a high-quality digital preview is the ultimate hook.

• Set Expectations: It gives potential visitors a perfect understanding of the layout, scale, and atmosphere of your space before they even buy a ticket.
• The Passive Marketing Magnet: Millions of people use Google Maps daily to scout destinations. By putting a pristine 360° map out there, you are intercepting them exactly when they are looking for somewhere to go.
• Branded Watermarks: Every single panoramic view we upload can feature a clean, non-intrusive watermark linking back to your business or booking page.
• Keep It Fun (The Easter Eggs): Because I hate boring, sterile corporate content, I want to infuse some personality into this. We can hide inside jokes, have staff members show up in unexpected frames, or create a mini "Where's Waldo" style experience within the map to make it highly shareable.

🇪🇺 The Vibe Check: Are You In?

Right now, I am looking to pilot this across Europe. Whether you have a high-end property that needs a premium virtual tour, or you manage a cultural site that deserves to be properly mapped on Google Street View, I want to hear from you.

This is a quick check to see where the interest lies. If this sounds like something your business, museum, or agency needs, let's talk about how we can build it.

Get in Touch

Drop me a line at 360@vandevliet.me with a brief description of your space, and let’s see what we can map out together.

If you’ve spent any time on tech Twitter, you probably know levels.io (Pieter Levels). In his bio, he has this legendary, completely transparent breakdown of all his different independent projects and income streams. As an entrepreneur and a creator, that "open builder" philosophy resonates with me deeply.

My goal is to build a portfolio career with multiple, interconnected streams of income. I’m not going to post my bank statements, but in the spirit of absolute transparency, I want to share the exact blueprint of my business ecosystem: what they are, who they are for, how they make money, and the beautiful synergies that link them together.

Here is how I am structuring my freelance empire under one single company umbrella.

🗺️ The Ecosystem at a Glance

Before diving into the details, here is how the pieces of the puzzle actually talk to each other:

🏢 Pillar 1: The Corporate Freelancer (Solution Architect)

This is my core professional background and the financial anchor of the entire operation. It provides the stability and capital required to bootstrap and fund the more experimental projects.

• What I do: I design high-level infrastructure, cloud systems, and software systems to solve complex business problems.
• Target Audience: Mid-sized to large corporate clients.
• How it makes money: B2B contract day rates and consulting retainers.

🎬 Pillar 2: The Production House (Travel Documentaries)

This is where my lifelong passion for filmmaking and storytelling meets my love for hitting the road on my Triumph Bonnie.

• What I do: Create raw, character-driven, episodic travel documentaries. The focus isn't on racking up miles or visiting "exotic" places just for show; it's about wandering into small villages or local neighborhoods and bringing human stories to life.
• Target Audience: Travelers, history buffs, and anyone who loves authentic human connection over hyper-polished, fake influencer travel content.
• How it makes money:
  • Traditional YouTube AdSense revenue.
  • Short-form monetization via Instagram Reels and TikTok.
  • The Physical Angle: I capture physical Polaroids on my trips, which I plan to auction off to the community.
  • The Long-Game: Eventually publishing a travel book compiling the stories, chaos, and lessons from the road.

🌐 Pillar 3: The 360° Content House

This branch was born directly out of my travel workflow. When I realized what it actually takes to create, stitch, and publish 360-degree footage to Google Maps, I saw a massive business opportunity back home.

• What I do: Create high-quality 360° virtual walkthroughs for premium spaces and publish official "Blue Lines" on Google Street View.
• Target Audience: Real estate agencies, indoor museums, and massive open-air cultural or nature reserves (think places like Het Zwin nature reserve here in Belgium).
• How it makes money: I charge a flat fee to shoot the content and upload the footage to Google Maps with the venue's branding/logo seamlessly integrated.
• The Synergy & Marketing: When I travel for the Production House, I drop Blue Lines to organically drive traffic to my channel via watermarks. When I do a commercial gig in Europe (like mapping a park), I can create cool behind-the-scenes YouTube videos showing how we built the 360° tour. Content feeds the agency; the agency feeds the content.

📊 Pillar 4: Niche Price Trackers

The "indie hacker" software side of the business. These are highly automated web utilities that run quietly in the background.

• What I do: Build data-driven price tracking websites for specific consumer goods.
• Target Audience: High-intent shoppers who know exactly what item they want to buy and are waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger.
• How it makes money:
  • Affiliate Revenue: Earning a percentage when a user clicks through our tracker and buys the item.
  • The Anti-Subscription Paywall: I know everyone is sick of monthly subscriptions. Instead, we use a small, one-time flat fee to unlock premium tracking features forever.
  • Targeted B2B Advertising: Because we know exactly what products users are searching for, we can partner with relevant advertisers using highly specific, intent-driven data.

🧸 Pillar 5: Toys by Jelle (The Web Store)

When I am home in Belgium, not traveling or consulting, I clear my head by building things with my hands. Because I live in an apartment in the city, I don't have access to a workspace to work with wood, instead I have found I really love sewing. And more particularly little plushies like whales:

• What I do: Design and hand-craft high-end, plush toys—like little decorative whales. These aren't cheap plastic toys meant to be destroyed by a toddler; they are designed as fancy, high-quality home decorations.
• The Travel Tie-In: I refuse to source cheap materials from giant factories. Every fabric will have a story. I want to source textiles from historic European mills, or better yet, buy local fabrics with traditional patterns directly on my travels. Think authentic tartan sourced straight from Scotland to build a limited run of Scottish whales.
• Target Audience: Interior design lovers and fans of my travel documentaries.
• How it makes money: Direct e-commerce sales. Instead of putting out a lazy, uninspired merch store with low-quality logo T-shirts, my community can buy a piece of beautiful home decor that carries a literal piece of fabric from the journey they watched on YouTube.

The Bottom Line

Being a modern freelancer doesn't mean you have to do just one thing for 40 hours a week until you drop. By treating my skills as an interconnected ecosystem, my corporate work funds my creative gear, my travel documentary channels market my B2B 360° services, and my physical journeys directly supply the raw materials for my web store.

It’s an interconnected web of code, cameras, consulting, and hand-stitched whales. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've talked multiple times about my goal to build a price-tracking empire. What started as a single, fragile app back in 2016 has evolved into a multi-region, multi-store data operation.

But when you're dealing with millions of products across Bol.com, Walmart, and beyond, your code can quickly turn into a chaotic spaghetti monster of broken scripts. As we started scaling up, I brought in some talented freelancers to help speed up development. Best decision ever. One of them introduced Prefect to our stack, and it completely changed the game for our orchestration.

Here is exactly how we use Prefect to run our data pipeline, and the exact infrastructure making it happen for cheap.

The Infra: DigitalOcean Apps Meets a Hetzner Auction Beast

I used to worry about creeping infrastructure costs, but I've finally found the sweet spot between cloud flexibility and raw hardware power:

• The Frontends: The actual customer-facing price tracking websites (like Prijzenvolger and Walltrack) are hosted on DigitalOcean Apps. It's clean, isolated, and handles web traffic beautifully.
• The Heavy Lifting: Everything else lives on a absolute beast of a server I scored in the Hetzner server auction. It came with a massively beefy memory setup and nvme setup, perfect for data crunching. And because it can handle all our memory intensive data flows and has enough storage to last us a 8 years, we're set for a while
• The Deployment: We use Ansible to manage the server configuration. Everything on this Hetzner machine; our databases, our queues, and our Prefect flows, is completely dockerized.

The Data Layer: Polyglot Persistence Done Right

Running dockerized on our Hetzner box is a polyglot data stack where every tool does what it's best at:

• PostgreSQL: Handles our relational data (product catalogs, user accounts, price watches).
• ClickHouse: The ultimate OLAP machine. It handles our massive, high-volume time-series price history. Every single price tick goes here.
• Vespa & Redis: Vespa handles semantic search, while Redis keeps track of runtime configs and rate limits.

Our codebase follows a strict rule: flows.py only contains high-level Prefect flow definitions. All actual business logic lives inside a tasks/ directory and is imported lazily inside each flow.

Let's see how that looks like for Prijzenvogler:

1. The Core Pipeline: Fan-Out Data Ingestion

The heart of Prijzenvolger (our Bol.com tracker) is the handle_datafeed_flow. It runs a strict Fetch → Process → Store pipeline inside its Docker container.

1. Fetch: Connects to Bol’s FTP server via FTPS, checks for duplicates, and downloads the gzipped data.
2. Process: We use Pandas to crunch the pipe-delimited CSV. Because Bol handles both the Netherlands (NL) and Belgium (BE), we split the data into parallel tracks and convert prices to clean integer cents.
3. Store: Prices get dumped into ClickHouse. Products get an UPSERT into Postgres.

The Postgres Partitioning Gotcha ⚠️

Because our Postgres product_product table is heavily partitioned for speed, it won't expose xmax. That means the classic RETURNING (xmax = 0) trick to see what rows are genuinely new doesn't work. Instead, we pre-query existing IDs per chunk to figure out what's new. Only those brand-new products are then pushed to Vespa for search indexing.

The 25x Fan-Out

Instead of writing a massive, slow flow, we wrote one generic flow and fanned it out 25 times using flows.yaml. Each deployment targets a specific category (e.g., electronics, books) with staggered cron schedules every 2 to 6 hours. This spreads the database and FTP load perfectly across our Hetzner RAM.

2. Deal Finder & User Alerts

• User Alerts (check_price_watches): Runs every 5 minutes. It grabs unfulfilled alerts, groups them by product so we only hit the live Bol API once per product, and fires off an email if the price drops.
• "Speurder Prikkie" Deal Finder (update_hot_products): An hourly ClickHouse query compares today’s latest price against yesterday’s max. We only keep drops between 20% and 70% (under 20% is boring; over 70% is usually bad store data). It uses a unique index in Postgres to remain completely idempotent.

Bonus: My Personal "Agentic" Prefect Stack

I fell so hard for Prefect while building this empire that I didn't stop there. Aside from the price tracking workflows, I have set up a completely separate, private Prefect stack on my infrastructure.

I use this secondary stack exclusively to run my own agentic flows—orchestrating AI agents, automated workflows, and LLM experiments. Having a reliable, UI-driven playground to monitor complex, multi-step AI tasks has been an absolute game changer.

Why This Setup Wins

By combining Prefect's orchestration with a split Postgres/ClickHouse architecture running on an auctioned Hetzner box, we get zero data corruption, real-time price accuracy, and incredibly low overhead.

The empire is growing, the workflows are automated, and the data is clean. As someone who always wanted to be a solopreneur, it's actually refreshing to work together with people on a project, and have them recommend tools that end up changing the business in a very positive way

Stay tuned for the next update!

You might have seen a Google Street View car like in the picture above. These cars drive around all over the place, capturing their surroundings in 360 degrees with that big camera on top of the vehicle.

Those images then get added to Google Maps, and these are part of the official Google Street View imagery.

Besides those cars, Google also has cyclists and people walking around with a 360 camera on top of their head to capture places where cars are not allowed. However during my last road trip through East Europe, Turkiye, Iran & Iraq, I found four places Google didn't capture yet. Four places with a ton of history, that make me super proud to add them to Google Street View.

Which places, you ask? Let's find out!

Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria

The Buzludzha monument is a officially the Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. It's built on the Buzludzha Peak in central Bulgarian. Building started in 1974 and finished in 1981.

Inside, there are some wonderful Soviet Mosaics, but unfortunately they closed off the inside for the public, because the building is in very bad state.

When I added it on Google Street View, there was only one other blue line, but these days on GSV there are a few other people that added it.

So, while I might not be the first or the only person to have added this amazing monument to GSV, I'm still one of the few that have preserved it for future generations to visit digitally

Troy

Yes, that Troy. The city famous from the ancient story about the Troian horse, and the 2004 epic movie with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and many other famous movie stars.

It's located on the West coast of Turkiye, and while it's not the most impressive ancient site to visit in Turkiye, it's definitely worth a visit! Just for the myths alone!

The site is divided in Layers, randiging from Troy 0, which is dated to the Early Bronze Age, up to Troy IX, dated to the Roman Period.

I'm currently still the only person to have added Troy to Google Street View!

Ur

Located in modern day Iraq, it was one of the most important Sumerian city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. It's famous for the Ziggurat of Ur, which you can see in the Google Maps snippet above.

It was founded in 3800 BC, that makes it almost 6000 years old!

If you've read the Bible, you might remember there was a place mentioned called Ur Kasdim. Scholars think that Ur is possibly Ur Kasdim, the birthplace of Abraham.

There is a ruin called "Abraham's house", but unfortunately, when I was there, a big part of the site was closed off for the public, so I couldn't add it to Google Street View. Maybe one day I'll have to go back then...

Uruk

This one is by far my favorite. Let me explain you why.

You know that meme about how every man thinks on a daily basis about the Roman Empire? I have the same but with Mesopotamia.

When I was 12, and I was in grade 1 of secondary school, I learned about Mesopotamia for the first time, and it intrigued me. What also didn't help that compared to Greek and Roman history, the time spent on the history of Mesopotamia was really short.

City-States.

Cuneiform.

Invention of the wheel.

Cradle of civilization.

Done.

That was basically it.

As it intrigued me so much, I went to the library a lot to find books about it, but I remember that was also very limited.

One of the books I got was about the epic of Gilgamesh. I can't remember which book it was, and I can't find it, but I got so obsessed with the epic poem. I must've read that book at least a dozen times in the four weeks I loaned it from my local library.

So twenty years after I first encountered Gilgamesh and Uruk, I was standing there in the Iraqi desert, with a 360 camera strapped on my back. Capturing the ancient city of Uruk, the birthplace of King Gilgamesh. A city that was once thriving, with very fertile soil, and that was now in the barren desert, under the excruciating heat of the sun.

In the epic poem of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is on a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life.

Spoiler alert:

While he doesn't discover the way to not die, he realizes that eternal life is not about living forever. It's about being a good man, and in his case, a good King.

After his heroic journey across the world on the lookout for ways to live forever, he returns to Uruk, taking his responsibilities, and realizes what it takes to be a good King.

In the end he got what he wanted: he didn't die. Millions of people still know his story today.

We don't know exactly when Gilgamesh lived, but scholars think it's around 2900-2700 BC.

So 4700 years after he died, a Belgian drove his motorcycle to Iraq, to visit Gilgamesh' birthplace and walk around it with a 360 camera so it could be added to Google Street View.

Keeping the story of Gilgamesh alive for a little longer.

Back in 2016, I built a price tracker for Belgium and the Netherlands called Prijzenvolger. My ultimate inspiration was CamelCamelCamel (the Amazon price tracker). Those guys make millions, and as a junior dev back then, that was exactly my goal. Just make millions. Easy, right?

Things actually started out great. I managed to get featured in HLN and even did a segment on VTM News explaining how it worked. User accounts and affiliate revenue spiked.

But as an inexperienced developer, things quickly got out of hand:

• I was dealing with gigabytes of product data and price updates on a daily basis.
• I relied solely on daily affiliate data feeds.
• The fatal flaw: A store updates its data feed in the morning, changes the price at noon, and by the afternoon, users are looking at wrong prices on my site shouting, "This thing is broken!"
• On top of that you're never going to guess where it was hosted. Damn right it was on AWS! RDS for the DB, EC2 managed myself for the hosting.

Between the creeping server costs, the pressure of my day job, and the brutal reality of waiting for SEO to kick in, I killed the project after about a year.

The Evolution: Python, Pandas, and Postgres

This project became my white whale. I started it, stopped it, started it, and stopped it again over the years.

A few years later, armed with more experience, I rebuilt it in Python using Pandas for memory-optimized data loading and TimescaleDB for historical data. It worked way better, but the infrastructure costs still managed to creep up every time I launched a new version

Eventually, I had a realization that comes with data engineering maturity: if you have a nice, beefy server, a well-optimized Postgres instance can handle this data perfectly fine without costing a fortune.

The New Strategy: Real-Time Precision

Prijzenvolger and Waltrack have been online and running smoothly for a while now, but it's time to step on the gas.

We solved the "stale price" problem with a new architectural requirement. Now, when a user lands on a product page, the backend instantly hits the store's API in the background to grab the absolute latest price.

The Empire Roadmap

To speed things up, I’m no longer flying solo. I’ve hired some great freelancers to help with development, and we are making massive progress. The goal is to launch dedicated, localized price trackers for major stores across the globe.

Here is the official hit list for the empire:

• Bol.com (Belgium & Netherlands): Prijzenvolger (The OG)
• Walmart (US):Waltrack.com
• Best Buy (US): GoodBetterBuy.com
• Allegro (Poland): Rynektrack.pl
• Mercado Libre (South America): Mercadotrack.com

We are building a massive, interconnected price-tracking machine, and it’s finally going exactly according to plan.

Stay tuned for more updates as we ship these sites out! 🚀

A collection of the Polaroids I took on my road trip with my Bonneville T120 in 2024.

🚩My red flag is that 90% of the time I forget I have my Polaroid with me, and when I do remember it I take three similar photos of the same subject.

This was my second bigger road trip, which started in Serbia, then went to Asia (Turkiye ,Iran, Iraq), and then back to Eastern Europe.

Flags collected:

🇩🇪* 🇦🇹* 🇸🇰* 🇭🇺* 🇷🇸 🇧🇬 🇹🇷 🇮🇷 🇮🇶 🇷🇴 🇲🇩 🇺🇦 🇵🇱*

\* I already visited these countries on my previous road trip

Intro

One of my favorite movies of all time is "Lawrence of Arabia". I rewatched the movie somewhere in 2023 and I decided that my next road trip was going to go to Saudi-Arabia.

But getting with a motorcycle from Belgium to Saudi Arabia is not easy and it takes a long time to get there. As I work as a freelancer and have some projects on the side, I just couldn't take six months off to travel.

On top of that, getting to Saudi Arabia by road is not easy.

Getting from Europe to Turkiye is the easy part. From there it gets difficult:

One option is to take a ferry to Israel, and then from Israel to Jordan, and then to Saudi Arabia. But the events that happened on October 7 and everything after that, made me decide that going to Israel was not a good idea right now.

I then checked if I could take a ferry from somewhere to Egypt, and then drive across the Sinai desert to Saudi Arabia. This is not possible anymore (it used to be). On top of that the Sinai desert is really dangerous and you get a military escort when you drive through it. I decided against that option, even though it would've been an epic Biblical themed road trip.

Okay, driving to Turkiye it is. But what then?

The border between Turkiye and Syria is closed, so even if I was crazy enough to go Turkiye > Syria > Jordan > Saudi Arabia, that is not possible.

Then the last option: Turkiye > Iraq > Kuwait > Saudi Arabia.

It turns out Iraq is pretty safe these days. And on top of that there are some amazing historical sites like Ur and Uruk I really wanted to visit in Iraq.

But after researching this a bit more, it turned out it wasn't possible, because of this reason: It's possible to cross Iraq from the south to north, but not north to south.

I'm not joking. I thought Belgium was weird, but that didn't make any sense.

The north of Iraq is Iraqi Kurdistan, a separatist region, that has their own language, culture and... borders and visa system. So when you enter Iraq from the north via Turkiye, you get an Iraqi Kurdistan stamp in your passport. When you then drive south, at one point you get to a border between Iraqi Kurdistan and Federal Iraq. Federal Iraq does not acknowledge this Iraqi Kurdistan stamp, and according to them you're basically illegally in Iraq. But instead of arresting you for illegally entering the country, they just don't let you through, so you're stranded in Iraqi Kurdistan.

There are - again - two options around this: You can enter Iraqi Kurdistan, take a plane from Erbil (IK) to Baghdad (FI), get a stamp from FI, then go back to IK, and you'll be free to enter Federal Iraq. This doesn't even work all the time. Don't ask me about the specifics, because I quickly decided that this was going to be the way I wanted to continue.

Another way is to enter Iraqi Kurdistan, hop the border to Iran, drive south, and then re-enter Iraq in the south, so you'll get a Federal Iraqi stamp.

This seemed to be the way to go for me. But then, the more I was researching Iran the more I started to like it, and I wanted to visit more and more cities in Iran.

What started as me going to "hop the Iraq-Iran border" for a few days, turned into me going to Iran for a few weeks, and skipping Saudi Arabia all together.

Now, it's picture time!

Serbia

I drove from Antwerp, Belgium to Belgrade, Serbia in three days. I had the worst side winds on the motorcycle I've ever experienced. It took 6 hours to drive 150 kms, because the winds were so bad and it was really dangerous.

I stayed in Belgrade for a week to work remotely and prepare a bit for the trip to Turkiye

Bulgaria

From Serbia I drove through Bulgaria, which was a great experience. I stayed in Sofia one night, and while I really was amazed by the beauty of the city, there's something I just really love about the very rural provinces of Eastern Europe.

In central Bulgaria there is an enormous communist monument called the Buzludzha monument. It's closed off for the public unfortunately, as it's on the verge of collapse. Inside there are the most beautiful Soviet style mosaics

I added the Buzludzha monument to Google Street View, and made a reel about the whole process

On the way to Turkiye I saw a sign pointing to Istanbul, and then it hit me that this adventure was really happening

Turkiye

Right at the border of Bulgaria and Turkiye, there's a beautiful city called Edirne where I stayed for a night.

From Edirne, I drove south to the Dardanelles to visit the ruins of Troy.

Yes that Troy! In Çanakkale they even have the original horse of the 2004 movie with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Diane Kruger.

Guess who in the world added the mythical city of Troy to Google Street View.. 😎

From Çanakkale I drove more south along the west coast of Turkiye. What an amazing trip that was.

You can't see it really well, but that book is a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Foreshadowing!?

I met these Belgians who transformed an old Polish fire truck to a beast of an overlander camper. You can see my Bonnie left from the truck.

From the west coast of Turkiye, I crossed the whole country from east to west, from Izmir to Van.

Central Turkiye was so nice to drive, the people were so friendly.

In central Turkiye I visited Konya, Cappadocia, Gobekli Tepe and the amazing city of Batman 🦇 (truth be told, this was a detour, but hey, I'm not gonna miss out on Batman)

Cappadocia was as magical as you think it is. It feels like you're driving through the Grand Canyon in the US.

And then in the morning at sunset you have this alien experience of the whole sky filled with hot air balloons while the sun is rising in the background. A truly breathtaking experience.

On the way to Van I quickly realised how bad I actually planned this road trip, because Lake Van is apparently located 1600 metres above sea level. I had no clue.

At one point I was driving among the mountain tops covered with snow. I got lucky the weather was really nice, and the roads were not covered with ice.

As I stopped at a gas station, I saw a couple of people slaughter a sheep in the garden of the gas station. They invited me for dinner, and the meat they served was soooo delicious.

Iran

From Turkiye I crossed the border with Iran, which went actually much smoother than expected. People were really helpful and the border guards were even trolling me by saying that my motorcycle is a Harley Davidson (Iran does not allow American made vehicles in).

When I successfully crossed the border I got in a bit of trouble. I had no mobile internet, my Google Maps offline maps were not working and I didn't have any Iranian money. All I knew was that I had to drive to Tabriz, a big city in the east of Iran, and that my hotel was 20 kms south of the city. But I had enough gas left for 150 kms, while the total trip to the hotel was at least 180 kms...

So I started driving, and luckily road signs in Iran are both in Persian and English, which .

I stopped in Khoy, which I remembered from when I was planning this trip.

I saw a motorcycle shop, and thought that the owner must be a young guy that could speak English and he would know where to exchange money and get gas for Bonnie.

But nope, it was an old 70 year old guy who did not speak a word of English. I managed to explain to him that I wanted to exchange money and get gas, and he told me to follow him to see his neighbor. His neighbor was an even older guy who signed me to follow him on his motorcycle.

As he drove in front of me, evading all the cars, and I tried to keep up with him, we stopped at a gas station. They filled Bonnie's tank. The old guy then handsigned me that I had to pay. I told him I had no money. He said "Card". I said "European cards don't work in Iran".

He then spoke to the gas station clerks and they told me it was fine. I later found out that gas is super cheap in Iran, and 14 liters is around 55 euro cents. CENTS. Literally CENTS. Compare that to 1.7 euro per liter in Belgium.

The old guy then guided me to a money exchange place. We said goodbye and I drove on to Tabriz.

It was getting late, and as it was so early in the year, the sun set at around 6-7pm. And I really did not want to drive in the dark, in a strange country. But I also had no choice, as I already booked a hotel.

I arrived in Tabriz in the dark at around 6:30pm. I got gas and asked some people in shops around the gas station if they had WiFi. One said he didn't, but another one had internet, so I managed to download my offline Google Maps. My hotel was another an hour drive, in the dark. I didn't really know what to do.

As I was standing by my motorcycle thinking what I was going to do, the guy who didn't had WiFi told me I could come inside his restaurant and use his hotspot. I gladly accepted his invitation. He gave me something to drink and told me that it was not a good idea to go to the hotel, as it was in the middle of nowhere and the roads were bad and dangerous.

He suggested to call some hotels in the center of Tabriz (only 1km away from his restaurant), and negotiate a good deal for me.

The friendliness of Iranian people is out of this world. That really motivated me to be way more proactively helpful to travelers I see in Belgium.

From Tabriz I drove to Tehran. I arrived at 6pm, right in the middle of evening rush hour. But I think in Tehran it's always rush hour. The traffic was insane, cars and scooters everywhere.

The first day I was in Tehran, I was so overwhelmed. It was my first day in more than a week where I was not riding my motorcycle. I explored Tehran, and everyone I met invited me in for tea. The first few times I kindly refused their invitations. Hey, I'm European. Nothing is free here. If a random person in Europe invites you in for tea, they're going to guilt you in buying something or they have some other ulterior motive. At least that's how I was brought up.

But at one point I was like "okay let's just say yes, we'll see that happens". And it was just that: a Belgian and some Iranians drinking some tea, talking about traveling, things to visit in Iran, what it's like to live in Iran, and stuff like that.

The most dangerous part of that was because I offered to pay for my tea, which is a big no no.

I was slowly getting relaxed all alone in this strange new country.

We all have read some horror stories about tourists taking photographs of (government) buildings and getting jailed. As I was walking around with my Polaroid in my bag, I was really paranoia. I really thought if I just take one picture of the wrong building, twenty police officers are going to surround me and I'm gonna be put in an Iranian jail for forty years.

I also didn't see any western tourists to talk with and ask their experience. When you read online on websites like Reddit, they say that it's all fine, and the buildings you can't photograph are clearly marked with signs, but I know better than to trust some random stranger on the internet!

This was my first image I took somewhere in an alley in Tehran. The more I walked around with my Polaroid out in the open, the more I realized I was going to be fine.

I also saw a bunch of girls taking pictures of each other in the gardens of historical houses and in museums. That's when I realized that taking pictures in the streets of Tehran is fine.

After a couple of days in Tehran, I drove south to Isfahan. I stayed in this amazing historical house called Ghasr Monshi hotel. If you decide to travel to Iran/Isfahan, I can highly recommended it. It's right in the center of the city, really calm and just a really beautiful hotel.

I really prefered Isfahan over Tehran. Tehran is really busy and noisy and there are cars everywhere.

Isfahan was really walkable and calm. It seemed more like a family city

One morning I woke up and I had a ton of missed calls and messages from friends and family. Turns out that Iran was "attacked" by Israel, aka Israel crashed a couple of drones on an air base near Isfahan. The newspapers were talking about World War 3, and there I was, in the city that was "just" attacked.

I had breakfast and started exploring the city, and I noticed nothing of what happened. No news, the people were not stressed or anything. I don't know if they knew it and didn't care or the attack was not discussed on the news.

Anyway, I went looking for a sign of the city as a nice souvenir that I was once attacked by Israel. And this bad picture I took of the entrance of a mosque will be forever my souvenir of the Israeli drone strike.

The day after I drove from Isfahan to Yazd. On the way I got in a really bad storm, with hail as big as marbles.

A pickup truck came driving in front of me and signaled me to stop at the side of the road. He invited me to his guest house to cover for the hail, and after the storm I could continue my travel to Yazd.

I accepted his invitation and followed him to his amazing guest house where we had tea and talked about traveling.

When it was time for me to move on, he gave me the advice to take the long route to Yazd, instead of the short one that GPSes recommend.

I thanked him for that advice and went on my way.

Unfortunately, at one point I took a wrong exit, and because I had no mobile internet Google Maps didn't reroute. All I knew is I had to drive east to Yazd. I continued driving on, saw a sign pointing east that said Yazd and took the exit.

I entered a highway that seemed to be brand new. After a few kilometers I got a bit suspicious. I only saw trucks and heavy machinery on this highway. I was clearly in some sort of industrial zone. Ah well, as long as I'd get to Yazd.

At one point there was a military checkpoint, which was not the first one I encountered so I happily gave my passport to the police officer. He walked way with my passport and after ten minutes he came back, and asked him to join him.

He took me to a room where he interrogated me for almost two hours.

"Where are you going?"
- "Yazd"
"Where are you staying in Yazd?"
- "Fazeli hotel"
"Where are you going after Yazd?"
- "Kerman"
"Where will you stay in Kerman?"
- "Don't know, I'm going to camp in the desert"
...
"Where are you going now?"
- "Uhm, to Yazd like I to-"
"Where will you still in Yazd?"
- "Fazeli hotel"

I don't know what the point of that was, but after two hours he decided I must really be going to Yazd and he gave me back my passport, offered some tea and bottles of water for on the way and let me go.

I later asked at my hotel in Yazd what that was al about, and apparently the short route between Yazd and Isfahan has a lot of industry and military complexes, with a few military checkpoints. With the "attack" by Israel happening a day earlier, they were extra curious why a European guy on a motorcycle was driving all alone there.

Glad that ended well!

In a coffee bar in Yazd I met Kamran, a super friendly Iranian whose dream is to one day move to Italy.

He gave me some amazing recommendations about things to visit in Yazd and Shiraz.

Yazd was a really calm desert city. It was really hot (for European standards anyway, I'm sure those Iranians were freezing) - around 33 degrees celsius.

When I was walking around Yazd I realized how big and different Iran is, and that every region in Iran has its own history in culture. The three cities I visited thus far, Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd, are so very different.

After four days in Yazd, I was ready to go to Lut desert, the hottest place on earth.

On the way there I stopped at a gas station, to get gas and buy a few bottles of water for on the way.

When I wanted to continue my journey, I couldn't start my motorcycle anymore. The key was totally bent, and it wouldn't go all the way in the ignition anymore.

Together with the help from some Iranians (their willingness to help a stranger in need is really the common thread in this story), we managed to get it somewhat straight again by hitting it with a stone.

Instead of continuing my journey towards to desert, I decided to turn back to Yazd and to get a locksmith to make a copy of my key.

As I was waiting for the locksmith to make a duplicate, some people from the touristic infodesk came and say hi, as they heard a traveler with a weird plate on his motorcycle was in town.

We talked about my plans to go to the desert, and they advised against it. It was already really hot there, but as it was outside the tourist season, it was even more desolated as before. They told me I could try to find a tourist agency to take me with them, but I really didn't want to do that.

As I just had this big trouble with my key, their discouragements were successful and I unfortunately decided against going to the Lut desert. I regret it now, but back then I was just happy I didn't get stranded with a bent key in the middle of Lut Desert.

Instead of driving east towards the desert, I drove south to Bakhtegan National park.

I was once again stranded in a storm in the dark. As I couldn't find any hotel or camping (they don't really exist anyway in Iran), I just pitched my tent behind someone's garden wall.

From there my trip to Shiraz continued.

In Shiraz I decided to take a few extra days to recover and explore the city, as I quickly find out it had a really amazing atmosphere.

I stayed at the Seven Hostel/ Rashedi House in Shiraz. It was an amazingly beautiful hostel, with the most friendly hosts.

I met some of the guests and together we explored Shiraz

The hostel was also really close to the famous Pink Mosque of Shiraz. Which was filled with teenagers and young girls taking pictures next to the leaded windows.

One of the most famous inhabitants of Shiraz was Hafez, a Persian poet who lived in the 12th century.

His poetry is very famous and important in Iranian/Persian culture. I thought it would be similar to Shakespeare in the UK.

I was wrong.

I went to visit Hafez' tomb where he's buried, fully expecting it to be a really calm experience.

Wrong again.

I entered the site where his tomb is and it was absolutely packed. Lots and lots of children, but also couples, families, and even some tourists.

Okay but apart from the big crowd, it will be calm, right? It's after all his burial place, a bit like a graveyard.

Wrong. Again.

People were reciting his poetry next to his tomb, people were clapping, cheering on the reciters, applauding, dancing. What an amazing experience that was. I got a very cool video of a young boy reciting poetry, and the whole crowd clapping rhythm. At one point he even made some special sound effects, which had the crowd in stitches. Unfortunately as you can see from the polaroid it were a lot of kids, so it would not be okay to share this video.

Together with Dmitry, the Russian guy from the group picture, I did a big tour of Persepolis, Necropolis and the tomb of Cyrus the great.

After six days it was time to leave Iran and go towards Iraq.

This is when I had one of the craziest days of my adventure.

I planned to cross the Iran - Iraq border somewhere near Talaieh (Iran) & Al Qurnah (Iraq). I read online that this border is really... let's call it fickle and unreliable. Some days they let one car through, some days no cars at all, some days there's no issues.

To prepare for this I drove to this border the day before I wanted to cross it, pitched my tent somewhere in the wild desert around three kilometers from the border, just so I could wake up really early and be there when the border opened at 7am.

This part of Iran is really hot, which meant I sweat all night, and barely slept. At night I heard all kinds of animals walk around my tent, and at one point I get woken up by something very sharp hitting me in the back, which I think was a little mouse or a rat biting me through my tent?

At 5:30 am I had enough of it, and as it was already light outside, I decided to get ready and go to the border. I packed all my gear, mounted my motorcycle, and drove off. But I didn't move an inch forward. But I did drive a few inch down, right in the sand.

I took off all the gear, dug my motorcycle out of the sand, parked it 50 meters further on the road, and dragged all my gear over there and got ready again. Mind you, at this point it's already 30 degrees Celsius.

I drove for 10 meters and I notice my wheel is wobbly. Oh no, flat tire.

It's not my first flat, so no big deal. I get some soap and some water and get to finding the hole. But I just can't find it. I take some more water and soap, but again, nothing to be found.

Luckily a guy on a scooter passes and stops to ask what's wrong. I explain him, and he tells me to follow him, as he's working at a building site and they have an air compressor. His colleagues were super friendly, offering me ice cold water which was welcome as I wasted all my water trying to find the hole in my tire.

We blow up the tire, trying to locate the hole, but we can't. After five minutes my tire is flat again.

He tells me the only option is to go to the mechanic in the nearby village, 9 kilometers from there. I have no other option and he tells me to follow him to the mechanic. Again, the friendliness of Iranians to help people in need is unmatched in this world.

We get to the mechanic, and he manages to find the puncture and fixes it.

The guy who helped me and I get back to the place we first met, we say our goodbyes, and I'm finally ready to cross the border to Iraq. Mind you, at this point it's still only 7:30 am.

I get to the border, some border agent takes my passport and documents and tells me to wait. After 45 minutes he returns and tells me I can't cross the border today, as they only allow Iranian and Iraqi vehicles here, no international vehicles.

He suggests I go to the border near Basrah, 180 kilometers south of this border. I have no other option and leave to go that border.

The weather is excruciating at this point, I'm sweating like a pig. I'm driving on some desolate highway that was just 100 kilometers straight on without any gas station or shop. I was getting severely dehydrated. Really not my favorite part of the trip.

Around midday I get at the Basrah border, and I immediately buy some ice cold water.

Borders are always a scary place, because they're very bureaucratic and most of the time border guards don't care to explain you what you have to do.

Of all the borders I crossed, this one was the worst.

First I had to exit Iran, then I entered no man's land (where's I'm officially outside of Iran but still not inside Iraq) and then enter Iraq.

The customs agent who helped me clear my motorcycle told me I had to leave my motorcycle with him and I had to get my visa stamped to exit Iran. I explained to the guy at the booth that the customs agent told me to get my passport stamped here and return, but it wasn't possible as I was officially outside of Iran. But my motorcycle was still inside Iran of course.

I don't know if they never had that situation before or it was a collaborate prank on me, but it was such a weird experience. Nobody knew what to do.

In the end they sent three soldiers of the Iranian guard with me to go back to the customs office, get my motorcycle documents, and then they escorted me out of Iran to no man's land zone.

Now I had to enter Iraq. It was a kafkaesque nightmare. They sent me from one office to the other. Then to another one, and another, and another and then back to the first one.

It was one big mess.

Finally after 4 hours of walking around the border zone, I got the right stamps and I was ready to go to my hotel in Basrah.

I mounted my motorcycle, and drove off. But no..

I drove for 10 meters and I notice my wheel is wobbly. Again. Oh no, flat tire. Again.

Luckily I have tubeless tires. I couldn't find the puncture again, so instead of trying to fix it, I just inflated my tires, drove for a kilometer or two, stopped, inflated them some more. The whole 20 kilometers to Basrah I drove like that.

I was planning to stay in Basrah for one night only, but I got stuck in storm. Proper storms too with lightning and hail. I ended up staying in Basrah for three night instead, which meant unfortunately that I had to skip visiting the Iraqi marshes.

I drove from Basrah to Nasiriyah, to Najaf, Karbala, and Baghdad.

I was down to my last pack of polaroid film too. There were two Iraqi places I really wanted to have a memory of:

The ancient cities of Ur and Uruk.

Ur is famous for its Ziggurat. I also took the time to add both of them to Google Street View. Most of Ur was closed off for the public, but Uruk was an amazing experience. It's a desolate archeological site in the middle of the desert, that's only been uncovered for 5%, because it's so desolate and lack of funding, and of course the instability of the region.

When you arrive at Uruk you get appointed a military guide who shows you around and makes sure you don't take any historical souvenirs with you. Because it's all just laying around there. You see shards of pottery everywhere, broken off parts of Sumerian tablets just laying around you in the sand. It's a really special experience.

Also, can you guess who added these old civilisations to Google Street View?

Here is a reel of me streetviewing Ur and giving the guard of Ur a nice souvenir, and here's a reel of me walking around Uruk.

Uruk is also the city of Gilgamesh, famous from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories we have. There's a great translation by Sophus Helle, which I took with me on my travels. The epic of Gilgamesh has really everything: love, hate, friendship, adventure, life lessons, and more. It's at least six thousand years old and even mentions the ancient floods, which are the same as the floods of Noah in the bible. It felt really special to be there in Uruk, the city state Gilgamesh ruled.

Baghdad was such a nice experience too. It's actually really modern, with great coffee bars and a lot of historical places. It's not really walkable apart from some parts around the Tigris. The Green zone was really special to visit too, it's where all the embassies and government buildings are. It has some amazing museums as well, and is more touristy than you'd expect.

From Baghdad I went to Erbil, then to Mosul and then back to Turkiye.

As soon as I got back to Turkiye I had a decision to make. I had to be home by a certain date, so I could either take my time in Turkiye, and from there speedrun my way back home. Or, I could speedrun Turkiye and go hunting for Soviet mosaics in Eastern Europe.

Easy choice if you ask me.

My last polaroid of part one of my trip is this one, taken while wild camping near the lake of Adana, Turkiye

I speedran towards Istanbul, drove over the Bosphorus with Bonnie, which was a very special feeling.

I stayed in Istanbul for two night, and just took my laptop to a nice tea house and planned the next part of my trip. And lo and behold I even found some Polaroid film in Istanbul.

From Istanbul I drove towards the Black sea to Burgas and Varna in Bulgaria, and Constanta in Romania. I didn't really visit anything here, but was just having so much fun again driving through these rural areas. From Romania I drove to Cahul, Moldavia.

Look at these beautiful mosaics!

I also noticed that Cahul was not at all what I expected from a Moldovian city. It might be prejudice, but I expected Moldovian cities to be gray and boring, but Cahul seemd green, and lively and full of people, and walkable.

Maybe Cahul was the exception to the rule and Chisinau was going to be the gray, boring, Soviet brutalist city I expected?

Honestly, the road from Cahul to Chisinau was not good. But being from Belgium, I feel I'm not supposed to complain about the road quality of another country.

Chisinau was nothing like I expected it to be. It's so walkable and clean. The covered market near the bus station feels really old fashioned, but then two streets from that you have just your average modern shopping street. You have amazing buildings everywhere that look straight from the historical centers of Vienna or Paris.

It's a beautiful mix of old and new, beautiful brutalist buildings like the Cosmos hotels or your typical Soviet apartment building and then modern parks with modern buildings and nice Parisian style coffee bars.

I also noticed that Chisinau and Moldova in general felt really safe.

Because of the war in Ukraine, there are also a lot of Ukrainians in Moldova. I met some of them, and they told me that the east of Ukraine is actually very safe right now, and that the war mostly takes place in the eastern regions.

Combine that with finding a book about Soviet mosaics in Ukraine, I knew I was going to take another little detour.

After a four day stay in Chisinau I left for Ukraine.

In the north of Moldova I came across this: an old Soviet monument for WW2 soldiers, and a stork's nest on top of it. I don't know if it's symbolic or anything, but it was such a nice scene.

From Moldova I drove towards Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk towards Lviv.

This was the last mosaic I saw in Ukraine, in the city of Lutsk. Funny that it shows a motorcycle!

After working a week remotely from Lviv it was time to drive towards Warsaw. In Warsaw I worked for another week remotely before making it back to Belgium.

A collection of the Polaroids I took on my road trip with my Bonneville T120 in 2023.

🚩My red flag is that 90% of the time I forget I have my Polaroid with me, and when I do remember it I take three similar photos of the same subject.

Odyssey 2023

September 2023

This was my first bigger multi-country road trip, in a very limited amount of time.

I first went to Italy, to get the ferry from Venice to Greece.

Then from Greece I drove all the way north to Warsaw, and then drove back home.

Flags collected:

🇩🇪 🇦🇹 🇮🇹 🇬🇷 🇦🇱 🇲🇪 🇧🇦🇭🇷 🇭🇺 🇸🇰 🇵🇱

Greece

Albania

Somewhere in the north of Albania I took a break because Google Maps was sending me through those mountains you see behind me, and those clouds did not look friendly at all.

A German group of motorcyclists stopped, we chatted a bit and then I asked one of them to take this photograph of me.

We drove together for a bit, and passed the border to Montenegro together. A bit later we said goodbye, as I was going to Podgorica and they were continuing on to Kotor.

Montenegro

The weather in Montenegro luckily got much better.

Bosnia & Herzegovina

One of my favorite U2 songs (it's technically not even a U2 song, but anyway), is Miss Sarajevo. I decided to stay a few days in Sarajevo to really absorb the city.

The city were WW1 basically started breathes culture and history. I had a really great time there, wandering about and meeting people.

Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia

From Bosnia & Herzegovina, I drove through the west of Croatia, towards Budapest, Hungary. From there I drove to the west of Slovakia towards Tatra National Park in Hungary & Poland

Driving through those little villages in Eastern Europe is such a nice experience. People are super friendly, curious about why you "chose" their village to ride through, and while Google Translate had to work overtime, it was very nice to connect with these fellow Europeans.

Poland

I decided to stay in Krakow for a few nights, and use one day to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Germany

The last polaroid of the trip, Bonnie in front of the Brandenburger Tor, Berlin.

A week ago I had to sign a PDF into .asice, and it was hell. My Belgian id card didn't seem to be able to sign in CAdES/PAdES/XAdES or whatever *AdES format.

But after a lot of trial and error I got it working with my Belgian ID card.

Here I'm going to explain to you how I did it. Just to be clear, I got it working with a BELGIAN ID card, on a Macbook. If you have an ID card from another country and/or Windows, it will work so too, but you're going to have to figure some things out on your own (mainly in step 3)

First I'm going to explain how to sign a PDF with CAdES with a Belgian ID card on a Mac, and below I'll explain what you need to figure out if you have an ID card from another country. You can skip the next part if you don't have a Belgian ID card but still want to sign a PDF into ASICE.

If you have a Belgian ID card but you're on Windows, step 3 will be different for you.

What you'll need:

• a card reader
• your ID card and your PIN code
• Belgian eID software: https://eid.belgium.be/en
• Belgian eID viewer to verify if everything works. Download it from the same link above
• Disig Web Signer: https://www.disig.sk/en/products/enterprise-solutions/disig-web-signer/
  Benodigdheden:
• Disig QES portal: https://qesportal.eu/Portal/en

Step 1 - Reading your Belgian ID card

Install all the software and restart your Mac

Then when you connect your card reader with your Mac, insert your ID card and open the eID viewer, you should see this:

And then after everything is read, you should see your ID card information in the "identity" tab. If this doesn't work, please try another laptop and/or another card reader. On an old Intel Macbook it works 100% of the time, but on a newer M2 Macbook half of the time it works every time)

The most important part to sign CAdES is the certificates. Go to the certificates tab of the eID viewer. You should see this:

If you don't see any certificates or the Citizen CA certificate is missing, you'll have to make an appointment with your municipality (gemeenteloket) to put some new certificates on your ID card. You DON'T need a new ID card. They can reinstall the certificates on your ID card in five minutes.

Guess how I know)

If you can correctly read your ID card and your certificates, you're ready for step 2.

Step 2: Signing the PDF

With Disig Web Signer installed, go to https://qesportal.eu/Portal/en

If you open Disig Web Signer, it's normal that you don't see any window open. It will automatically later.

On the QES portal, first change the language to English in the top right, that's handier. Then select the document you want to sign. It can basically be any type of document. It will be encapsulated in the .cades document, which works as a container around your original document.

For example, I'm going to sign my memoji, but you'll probably want to sign some super important PDF)

Click "Sign" and it will then process the request. It might take a while (30 seconds) or longer, depending on how large the document is.

If everything goes well, it opens Disig Web Signer and you can see or read your document, like this:

Click "Sign" in the top right.

Step 3: Selecting the right certificate store

If you're on Windows or you use an ID card from a different country, this is where our paths divert. You will see a popup like this to select the store:

In my case, I also installed the Slovakian eID klient, to see if it worked with that. That is why the Slovak national identity card is pre-filled in, but it won't work with your Belgian ID card. So it's totally normal if you only see "Define custom store". Click on it. A finder window will open

For Mac, the store is located here:

/Library/Belgium Identity Card/Pkcs11/beid-pkcs11.bundle/Contents/MacOS/libbeidpkcs11.dylib

For Windows, the store is supposedly located here (according to this documentation here)

C:/Windows/System32/beidpkcs11.dll

For Windows I have not verified if it works like this. If you are on Windows, can you let me know by emailing me on hello@vandevliet.me? I helped you by taking the time to write this blog, please help the people after you by letting me know if it works or doesn't.

If you use an ID card from a different country, this file will obviously not be in the folder 'Belgium Identity Card'. I'd suggest looking through the documentation of your government. Look for something like this on Google:

PKCS11 + your country + id card

Or just ask ChatGPT)

Let's continue!

If you're on Mac, you're going to browse to the root of your hard disk, it should look like this:

I checked on multiple Macs, and they're all called Macintosh HD. Hopefully for you it's the same.

You should see this:

Go to Library > Belgium Identity Card > Pkcs11

On my Mac it looks like this:

Select the libbeidpkcs11.dylib. That's the one I used, and hopefully it works for you too. If it doesn't, try it with another one and please let me know so I can update this guide! My email is down below)

Click the refresh button behind the store, it will then load all the certificates.

If everything went well, you can select the Citizen CA certificate from your ID card:

Then you can continue by entering your PIN code.

You'll get redirected back to QES in your browser

There you can validate the signed document:

And here's the ASICE container if you want to sign or validate it yourself. Don't worry, there's no hidden contract hidden in the image or something.

Congratulations you successfully signed a PDF into asice (CAdES) with your Belgian identity card!

I tried everything, signing it with Acrobat, trying dokobit, creating a Mobile-ID, nothing worked. This was the only way I got it working. If you found another way to sign it, you can always let me know, my email is below!

If it didn't work, you can email me too, but I don't know if I'll be of much assistance. I'd say, try a different browser (I used Chrome, try Firefox or Safari), a different laptop or a different card reader. I'm not joking, I have two card readers, it works with one of them (with the other one the eID viewer stays empty). On a newer M2 Macbook Pro it only sometimes recognizes the card reader, on an older MBP it only works all the time with the other card reader.

Questions, remarks, love letters, feel free to send them to hello@vandevliet.me. Documents you sent me have to be in .asice format signed with CAdES of course)

If you are reading this right now, you probably found your way here through my social media channels where I've been desperately trying to spread the word.

This is a post I never wanted to write. On May 7, while traveling through Iraq, all of my camera gear was stolen in Basra.

Here is exactly what happened, what was taken, and how you can help.

The Incident

I was driving north toward Nasiriyah and stopped for a quick coffee on Dinar Street in Basra, right near the Basra Times Square mall. I parked Bonnie, went inside, and when I came back out, my heart completely dropped.

Someone had used a knife to slash open my large motorcycle bag. They wiped me out completely—not just the camera gear, but also the clothes and toiletries that were packed inside that main bag.

Because of the language barrier, trying to ask around the street for witnesses was incredibly difficult. Luckily, I found some local military personnel who were very kind and helped escorted me to the police station. The police weren't exactly helpful, but they took down a definitive list of my items and told me they would look out for them.

Why This Is a Complete Disaster

As you know, I am a filmmaker. I had just crossed over the border from Iran, where I spent weeks on my motorcycle filming every single day of my journey to create a cinematic series for YouTube.

Because the internet in Iran is so heavily restricted and slow, I couldn't backup any of my videos to the cloud. The only copies of that entire journey existed on my external SSDs. The raw heart and soul of that trip was on those drives.

Normally, I keep my camera gear in my rucksack on my back. But because I knew I had a long stretch of driving ahead of me to get to Nasiriyah, I decided to put the heavy camera bag inside my main motorcycle luggage to give my back a break while riding. It turned out to be the worst decision of the trip. The only saving grace is that my laptop was still in my rucksack, so I haven't lost everything, but the footage and the tools of my trade are gone.

The Stolen Gear List

If you are in Iraq, look at local marketplaces, or browse online selling platforms, please keep an eye out for these specific items:

• Camera: Fujifilm X-S10 (with camera harness)
• Lenses: Fujifilm 18mm, Fujifilm 90mm, and a 18-55mm kit lens
• Filters: Various ND (Neutral Density) filters
• Storage: Samsung 4TB SSD (This contains the priceless Iran footage)
• Rigging: Portable Zeapon Micro3 Pan Kit
• Support: Tripod equipped with a Gimbal head
• Accessories: Camera chargers, cables, a handful of SD cards, and extra batteries.

How You Can Help (Financial Reward)

If you have any tips, if you saw anything suspicious on Dinar Street on May 7, or if you see this gear being sold anywhere online or in person, please contact me immediately at: lost@vandevliet.me

Any tip that directly leads to the recovery of my gear and footage will be heavily financially rewarded.

Please share this post on your own channels, especially if you have connections to travel, photography, or local groups in Iraq. Thank you all so much for the support.

If you'd like to beta test Grafiki for iOS, sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YD1eI-gh25_pnZX5DkvBGKS9yPPPYsy9EdLpJCKwlP0/edit

Open blog about building Grafiki. Writing helps me clear my head and solve obstacles I come across. These blogposts might not make sense for you to read, but for me they help me to clear the fog in my head.

25 November 2023

13:33 - Writing this blogpost so I have a link to use in my Quora ads. I used Adobe Firefly to create an image of a mandril with a sunset in the background. That's the image you can find at the top of this page.

14:12 - Just created test ads for Pinterest, Quora, Snap, and LinkedIn. It's crazy how fast you can do that these days. Just add a headline, body, image and a link. Select some people to target, add your credit card and done. Quora and LinkedIn review seem to take at least 24 hours, especially in the weekend, but Snap and Pinterest went live fast. These are not the best ads and are actually not meant to bring in users. I just need some test data in my own ad accounts, so when I actually use the APIs I get some proper data back instead of zeroes everywhere.

14:17 - Updated blogpost. I added the Quora API recently already to the backend. Now gonna start with Pinterest.

I basically have two Graphql endpoints: a getSubstructures endpoint and an analytics endpoint. The analytics endpoint is for later, because I'll need to study the different APIs more.

The getSubstructures endpoint allows me to - as the name suggests - get the substructures for an entity. For example you have a LinkedIn campaign group with ID 1234, I can use the endpoint in the app to fetch all the substructures for that campaign group, which are campaigns. Other ad networks don't have campaign groups, but instead use campaigns at that level.

I want as little logic in the app as possible, everything should be very dynamic. It's up to the backend to do the heavy lifting and give the data back as uniform as possible. I don't want to have logic like this in the app:

if (adNetwork == 'Linkedin') {
	header = 'Campaign'
} else if (adNetwork == 'Pinterest') {
    header = 'Ad Group'
} else if (adNetwork == 'Snap') {
    header = 'Ad Squad'
}
// ... etc

15:51 - Back after a little Duolingo intermezzo. If you want to connect on Duolingo, add me: GMJelle. Now back to Pinterest ads API.

Just noticed that LinkedIn already spent 6 euros for 54 website clicks. Pretty good result actually! If you're reading this through LinkedIn (or any other ad), you can sign up here to betatest the app soon: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YD1eI-gh25_pnZX5DkvBGKS9yPPPYsy9EdLpJCKwlP0/edit

Snap ad was not yet approved, the Quora ad was delivering but no clicks yet.

With Quora ads you basically get both analytics and entity details in one API call. Pinterest is gonna make me do two calls, one for the analytics, and another one to get the entity details like the name (of the ad group for example). Don't like it but it is what it is.

Pinterest API does not allow me to get analytics for all Ad Accounts in 1 call, unlike with campaigns and ad groups. So won't bother showing Analytics data for Ad Accounts, as it will result in an n+1 problem.

16:29 - coffee time!

16:33 - back at the desk. I'm having a bit of trouble staying focused because I try to keep it as dynamic as possible. The names across all APIs are different, with the only similarity being that the lowest level is called Ad across all networks. The level above can be called Ad Squad, Ad Set, Ad Group, etc. So instead of calling the lowest level "Ad", and the second level "Ad Squad/Set/Group", I decided to just count my way up:

Level 0: Ads
Level 1: Ad set/group/squad or Campaign (looking at you LinkedIn!)
Level 2: Campaign or Campaign Group
Level 3: (Ad) Account
Level 4: Organization, Business account, or User

It just makes it a bit difficult and abstract to think: If I want the substructure of Level 3 of Pinterest, what am I fetching? Answer: Campaigns

I have a table in Notion mapping all entities, but still, I lose my train of thoughts sometimes.

17:44 - Ordered food, it's here in 6 minutes. Then gonna eat, play chess and afterwards continue. It's going slow, but it's going.

18:42 - Let's get back to the matter at hand: Pinterest Ads API!

20:52 - I don't really like the code I wrote but it works. It's pretty abstract and I don't like the fact that it's possible for the Pinterest Ads API to return no analytics data at all for e.g. a campaign if it has no data. Instead of giving zeroes back, it just doesn't return anything. But I still want to have zeroes in the data I send towards the client, so I need to fill those up.

21:22 - Okay the above example was actually easily solved. But still!!1! Not easy to do all this dynamically and clean. This is not an excuse for my bad coding skills (it is).

26 November 2023

00:32 - Pinterest is now completely done. There was a little issue with the filtering, but that is solved now. Hooray for TDD! Now I'm gonna prepare the LinkedIn API for tomorrow. I'm reading through the docs, see how the structures are built and then add some API requests in Bruno (a Postman alternative)

13:48 - Had breakfast, did my mobility exercises an took a nice shower. Then did some Duolingo and played chess, and I'm ready to continue this little wrestle with the LinkedIn API. But first... coffee!

18:39 - That will be it for this weekend. The LinkedIn API is pretty odd, and I keep getting 400 status errors, even when executing Postman requests they provide or by using cURL requests I copy-paste from the docs. Hopefully I can make some progress this week.

23:59 - I was really tired around 22:30, but got a sudden burst of energy. I put on some candles and am sitting behind my desk, going to get the LinkedIn API to work. Not gonna spend hours on it obviously, but it would be nice knowing what goes wrong with the analytics calls.

27 November 2023

00:31 - Holy shit is the LinkedIn API one big mess. I see API examples online for calls to:

https://api.linkedin.com/v2/...

and

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/...

And then you have the Linkedin-version header you have to add, but also a X-Restli-Protocol-Version.

And if you want to use the v2 endpoint, this example from 1 year ago says that instead of using adAccounts you have to use adAccountsV2. But there's nothing on the official LinkedIn marketing documentation website to be found about the V2 suffix.

And then you have the Postman collections you can use (which use the /rest/ path, so I assume that one is the correct one). However, those requests give back errors about missing parameters.

28 November 2023

19:00 - Finished work and dinner. Going to try to untangle the LinkedIn Analytics API one more time. Let's hope I get it to work today!

22:11 - Literally did nothing. The Sinquefield cup (chess) started so I've been watching that on YouTube.

2 December 2023

00:30 - Gonna map the Snap API in Bruno and then go to bed.

3 December 2023

19:51 - Went out with family to celebrate my birthday. Came home, took some time to wind down and eat something. I'm now in my lounge chair with a crackling candle and a cup of hot tea next to me, while some lo fi beats are playing on the TV. Let's see if I can finish writing tests for the LinkedIn API today and maybe implement the substructures endpoint as well!?

9 December 2023

18:32 - It's been a while. I kinda forgot about updating this blogpost to be honest.
So where are we? How have you been? All good?

I've been working since noon today. A couple of days ago I found an amazingly clean way to transform the API requests from the ad networks into a uniform API request for the Grafiki API: Pandas!

I load it all into one or two dataframes, merge them, clean everything up and then just .iterrows() factory the rows into dataclasses and tada! No more for loops, checking if keys are in the response, etc. I transformed around 150 lines of pretty complex manual code into 24 lines of Pandas magic for the Snap and Quora API. To see what transformations I have to do I have a Jupyter Notebook per platform, the API mock ad network requests and the result the results the Grafiki internal API should return. TDD!!!

So I'm going to continue transferring the other platforms to this Pandas way. And then the API to get the substructures is done. It didn't go as fast as I want, I got some trouble focussing and staying motivated. Especially after work I don't have the energy left to work on this. That's why the weekends are for hustling.

I'm gonna order food now and I'll give you an update in a couple of hours. Talk to you later!

20:36 - Took a little break and updated my blog to Ghost V5. Woohoo inline code!. And emoji search when typing a colon 😁. Just what I needed to keep you all up to date. Be prepared for a ton more emojis from now on! But for now... back to business! 💼👨‍💻🏢

22:40 - Listening Lofi & Chess.com's chill beats. I feel I'm super focused, it's going great. Snap and Quora are using the Pandas way of working and it's so much fun and so easy to work with. Right now I'm gonna map the Pinterest API!

10 December 2023

02:23 - The LinkedIn API is a pain in the... Let me show you what I mean.

So first of all, they have this new way of filtering things throught the API. Imagine you have an API, and you want to fetch the ads from the campaigns with ID urn:li:23 and urn:li:456, and you want no test_data and you want to order everything by ID. Normally it would look something like this:

https://myapi.com?campaign_ids=urn:li:123,urn:li:456&test_data=false&order_by=id

Makes sense, right?

Now the new LinkedIn API wants you to send your query like this:

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/adAccounts/XYZ/adCampaigns?q=search&search=(test:false,campaigns:(values:List(urn:li:123,urn:li:456)))&sort=(field:ID,order:DESCENDING)

Which looks clean, but it works like shit. Because it gets urlencoded into this by for example Postman and Python's requests:

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/adAccounts/XYZ/adCampaigns?q=search&search=%28test%3Afalse%2Ccampaigns%3A%28values%3AList%28li%3A123%2Curn%3Ali%3A456%29%29%29%0&sort=%0A%28field%3AID%2Corder%3ADESCENDING%29

And the API of LinkedIn can't handle the different kinds of colons: the first colon after 'test' acts like an equal sign (=), but then you have colons in the IDs (urn:li:123) and then it thinks the colons also act like equal signs.

Anyway, it's getting late, let's this dev session with a rant, and go to bed. Goodnight! Dobranoc!

14:42 - Alright! Are you ready to delve in the mysterious LinkedIn API with its many traps and odd characteristics? Want to join me and discover all ins and outs of it, every little bit, so we can finally leave this part of Grafiki behind us? If you said yes, then fasten your seatbelt, and get ready. The road is gonna be bumpy but rewarding. Vamos!

21:56 - Just a heads up for all API developers. If your examples on your documentation pages don't work, you messed up. Yes, I'm (still) looking at you LinkedIn!

Left: me trying to look professional while covered in dust; right: my trusty Bonneville T120, Bonnie, who is technically our chief operating officer.

If you’ve been following my journey, you know I have a bit of a habit of pointing Bonnie's front wheel toward lines on a map, getting stuck in ridiculous weather, and chasing down local stories.

Well, I’ve decided to turn this passion into something official. I already have my own company for my freelancing work, but within that business, I’ve just launched a brand-new venture. Let’s call it a video production house, or a content house cause in 2023 video is no longer all for the horizontal screens.

The goal isn't just to travel for the sake of racking up miles, and it’s definitely not about chasing "exotic" or "special" destinations just because they look wild on a map. The ultimate goal is to find deep, raw human stories and bring them to life.

You don't need to cross the entire planet to find something incredible to share. If you want an idea of the vibe I’m aiming for, it’s a unique mix of a few things that heavily inspire me:

• Wildlens by Abrar & Itchy Boots: For that rugged, solo motorcycle overlanding grit.
• Reizen Waes: A massive Belgian travel show where Tom Waes takes an adventurous, deeply curious approach to unusual or isolated places.
• Bald and Bankrupt: The absolute master of wandering into completely ordinary, overlooked places and uncovering brilliant human interactions.

That is exactly what I want to do. I want to show the genuine hospitality of people in a tiny, forgotten village in Belarus, but I also want to find and share the fascinating, hidden stories right in Schelle for example, a municipality near Antwerp where I live. Stories are everywhere; you just have to go looking for them.

But looking forward at this massive plan, I realized this isn't just a sudden whim. This is actually the culmination of a dream I’ve been building toward my entire life.

Why This Is My Dream (And How I Got Here)

Making videos is something I have absolutely loved doing for as long as I can remember. It all started when I was 13 years old and got my hands on a home video camera. My younger sister and I would spend hours making these little movies at home. I still vividly remember making one movie all about going to the park, and another where we shot a complete parody of Idool (the talent hunt show here in Belgium and the Netherlands). It was incredibly fun, and even back then, I was totally obsessed with experimenting with different camera angles, trying out framing, and adding background music to nail the mood.

As I got older, that obsession shifted into photography. When I was 21, I bought what was a nice camera at the time: a Nikon D5100. I used it to dive into party photography, and even tho I got frustrated often with how it performed in low light situations with my shitty lenses I bought with money from my student job, I absolutely loved it. A friend of mine (who is also called Jelle) and I teamed up under the name "Those Two." Within the Mechelen region in Flanders, we actually became the absolute go-to photographers for student parties and nightlife events.

That evolved into another project. Together with a friend, I created a music website called backstagetour.co. We scored press accreditations and started interviewing bands and artists. We actually shot some great video sessions with EDM artists like Feint and Fox Stevenson that are still up on YouTube today. We also landed an interview with The Noisettes, who became pretty huge and recently went viral on TikTok. We even almost interviewed Simple Minds, but the lead singer caught a cold at the last second and didn't want to take any chances, so it was canceled at the absolute final minute.

Naturally, we hit the festival circuit to take photos and videos, which brought its own share of hard lessons. At the Linkerwoofer festival, Daan took the stage and was clearly having an incredibly pissed-off day. In the middle of the set, he completely trashed and smashed his guitar right on stage. I had the camera pointed right at him and caught the whole thing!

...Except when I got home, I realized I had accidentally left the camera in manual focus, and the entire shot was blurry as fuck. It was devastating because it became a massive news story in the Belgian media the next day. If I had caught it cleanly and put it on YouTube, I could have partnered with the biggest newspapers to embed it in their articles. A brutal lesson, but one that taught me to always, always double-check my settings.

Every single one of these steps, from the blurry festival footage to the late-night editing sessions, has been leading to this production house.

Or as Steve Jobs one said:

The Strategy: The Google Street View Loop

Since this is a legitimate branch of my business, I needed a real marketing engine. I’ve come up with a business plan loop that connects my love for exploring local history and forgotten spots with a way to naturally grow a YouTube audience.

When looking at maps of remote villages, hidden monuments, or old historical markers, I noticed that so many of them completely lack proper Google Street View coverage. That is where our marketing strategy comes in:

• The Blueprint: I travel to these undocumented or forgotten spots on Bonnie, packing a high-quality 360-degree camera alongside my cinematic gear. I'll probably go for the Insta360 x3.
• The Upload: I map out these areas and upload them to Google Maps as official "blue lines."
• The Hook: Curios history lovers, researchers, and locals search for these unique locations on Google Maps every day. When they drop the Street View pegman to explore, they will see our crisp, 360-degree footage.
• The Conversion: Embedded in that Street View footage will be a clean, subtle watermark directing them to our YouTube channel.

If someone is curious enough to virtually walk through a forgotten corner of the map, they are exactly the kind of person who will want to watch a cinematic movie showing the real story, the local characters, and the journey of how we got there.

The Next Horizon

This production house is about stepping up the cinematography, taking the technical lessons I've learned over the years, and finding the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary.

The gear is packed, the business structure is ready, and we are hunting for stories; whether they are thousands of kilometers away or right down the street from my front door.

The next time you hear from me, the journey officially begins. Hit subscribe, and let’s see where the stories take us.

Ok, this took me a while to figure out. Let's keep it short and to the point:

How  you add a custom domain to App Runner in 5 steps

1. Move the DNS of your domain to Route 53. Yes, I tried it with Cloudflare but I didn't get it to work.
2. Go to your App Runner service and go to the tab custom domains. Enter your domain name in the popup: e.g. grafiki.cc.
3. You will see a table with DNS records you have to create. The certificate validation records are CNAME records, the DNS target i an A-record that you can point to an ALIAS.

4. The CNAME records are easy to set up, to add the DNS target, this is what it should look like:

a) Check that record type is A

b) Check "Alias"

c) We want to alias an AppRunner service, and then in the dropdown below check your region. The choose your app on AppRunner.

5. Now you have to wait till the certificates from ACM are validated. In my case this took 4 hours.

Alright, let's keep it short. I normally use BitBucket, but had to make a few changes to a Github git repo.

So I did the changes, added everything, wrote a poem of a  commit message, wrote git push in the terminal and then pressed enter.

ERROR!

remote: Support for password authentication was removed on August 13, 2021. Please use a personal access token instead.
remote: Please see https://github.blog/2020-12-15-token-authentication-requirements-for-git-operations/ for more information.

And while the blogpost is a helpful guide on helping you generate an access token, it doesn't tell you what to do with it.

How to use your Github Personal Access Token on Mac OSX

1. Open Keychain Access
2. Search for "github"
3. If you have multiple entries, for me the github.com internet password on the login keychain (not iCloud keychain) entry was the one. Double click on it
4. Click on the checkbox next to Show password:
5. Enter your Mac User password.
6. Replace the password of your git account that you see there with your Personal Access Token.
7. You can now push all those magnificent code changes again in the terminal.

Why is this necessary?

Before Github worked with personal access tokens, you entered your password. And so you entered your Github password in every application that worked with Github: the Github CLI, maybe a git plugin for Pycharm/Webstorm/VS Code, the Github GUI, etc. And as every application has basically full control over your Github account, it can delete repos, read pgp keys, etc. That's not very secure.

By using personal access tokens you can create an access token for every application that requires you to be authenticated. So this way you can create a PAT (Personal Access Token) for the Github CLI, another one for Pycharm, etc. You can also set the scopes for every PAT. That way you can give only the applications you fully trust pgp key read access for example.

I hope this little guide helped you!

Jelle

I thought it would be fun to create an overview of my best chess games here.

These are not the highest level games you've ever seen, but they've either made me cheer like I just won the Candidates tournament or tilt like I lost my life savings at roulette. Who says chess is boring?

Two Brilliants in a row

Never surrender

The first game gave me the idea to create an overview like this. It's weird that in some games I have the feeling that I'm not playing that well and end up with a 95% accuracy, and in other games I feel like Magnus and I got a 32% accuracy.

In this game I was clearly the worst player of the two for the biggest part of the game. However one mistake (it's not even a blunder according to the engine) by my opponent under time pressure made me come back.

It's like Eric Rosen says: never resign. Always go for dirty stalemates, and before you know it, your opponent might blunder a queen and you win the game.

Accuracy rules

This game was my 2nd game in the Daily Blitz (5+0) Tournament on Lichess. After resigning the first game against a higher ranked player, I was paired with a player that was rated 1403, around 330 rating points lower than I. So I had no other option than to berserk, which made it a 2.5+0 game for me, but I would get double points.

I was hoping to get a Sicilian Dragon, an opening I've been studying for the last couple of weeks and I'm enjoying more and more, but we get a Bowdler.

The rest of this game was nothing special, but it's not often that Lichess says you have 0 accuracies, 0 mistakes and 0 blunders! I entered the pgn on Chess.com and I played at 93.2 accuracy.

As I explained in my post "On Making Price Trackers", I prefer to only make a price tracker for a shop if it has an API for me. And luckily, Walmart has one, so I decided to build Waltrack.net, the first free Walmart Price Tracker.

However, the road from making my Walmart developer account to actually making my first API call was a bumpy one. The API requires you to create a keypair and use the secret key to sign the request. Something I haven't done before.

Luckily I managed to get it working and hopefully with this blogpost you won't have to spend as much time figuring things out as I did.

Assuming you already have your Walmart.io developer account, the first step is to create an application and create an RSA keypair.

Walmart's guide on this is solid, so you can just follow it.

When you copy-and-pasted the public key to the upload page on Walmart.io you are ready to make your first API call

Making your first API call to Walmart.io

If you want to comment on this code, you can do so on the Github Gist I created.

import NodeRSA from "node-rsa";

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MY PRIVATE KEY
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    
    
const generateWalmartHeaders = () => {
  const { privateKey, consumerId, keyVer } = keyData;
  const hashList = {
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": consumerId,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": Date.now().toString(),
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": keyVer,
  };

  const sortedHashString = `${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"]}\n${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"]}\n${hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"]}\n`;
  const signer = new NodeRSA(privateKey, "pkcs1");
  const signature = signer.sign(sortedHashString);
  const signature_enc = signature.toString("base64");

  return {
    "WM_SEC.AUTH_SIGNATURE": signature_enc,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"],
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"],
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"],
  };
};



export const getProductById = async (productId) => {
  const options = {
    method: "GET",
    headers: generateWalmartHeaders(),
  };

  const res = await fetch(
    `https://developer.api.walmart.com/api-proxy/service/affil/product/v2/items/${productId}?publisherId=${keyData.impactId}`,
    options
  );
  
  return await res.json()
};

Note: If you get an error saying thate node-rsa Expected 0x2: got 0x30, you can try to convert your key. I am not that proficient with SSL/RSA and keys and all that, but using this tool to transform my PKCS#8 to PKCS#1 did the trick.

Also make sure you don't have any wrong indentation.

This will work:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MY PRIVATE KEY
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

This won't work:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
                 MY PRIVATE KEY
                 -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

This won't work either:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----MY PRIVATE KEY-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

Explaining how to make Walmart API Headers

const generateWalmartHeaders = () => {
  const { privateKey, consumerId, keyVer } = keyData;
  const hashList = {
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": consumerId,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": Date.now().toString(),
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": keyVer,
  };

  const sortedHashString = `${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"]}\n${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"]}\n${hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"]}\n`;
  const signer = new NodeRSA(privateKey, "pkcs1");
  const signature = signer.sign(sortedHashString);
  const signature_enc = signature.toString("base64");

  return {
    "WM_SEC.AUTH_SIGNATURE": signature_enc,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"],
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"],
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"],
  };
};

To create the headers we need 4 things:

1. The private key
2. The Consumer ID from the Walmart IO Dashboard
3. The Key Version, also from the Walmart IO Dashboard (see screenshot below)
4. A NodeJS library to read and sign the private key – I used node-rsa ( yarn add node-rsa )

Basically what you have to do with the headers is concatenate the Consumer ID, the Timestamp and the Key Version with new lines between them.

Then sign that string with your private key and convert it to base64. Then append this base64 string in the headers, so Walmart on their side can check with the public key you uploaded before if it's actually you. It's kinda how SSL certificates work as well.

That's in a nutshell how to create API calls to the WalmartIO API. All in all it's not that hard, but it's kinda unusual to use a secret key to sign an API request.

For any questions or problems you run into, you can comment on the Github gist here.

Happy Walmart API hacking!

Jelle