I build things that think, move & occasionally misbehave.
I'm Boris — a developer & maker. Interactive experiments, AI agents, and a chess bot that opens with the Bongcloud on purpose. Most of it is built to be played with.
Selected work
Things I made on purpose
A rotating set of projects, experiments, and one chess bot with a personality disorder.
AI · Chess engine · 2025
Bongaclang
A from-scratch chess engine in Python: iterative-deepening negamax with alpha-beta pruning, a quiescence search, piece-square-table evaluation, and MVV-LVA move ordering. It runs as a Lichess bot — and its signature move is marching the king out early (1. e4, 2. Ke2) like an absolute menace. I ported it to TypeScript so you can play it right here.
Coffee
2026Desktop app
A Windows tray app that keeps your PC awake, with an animated steaming-cup UI.
INNO_Sim
2025Simulation
A systems/innovation simulation with rich, notebook-driven visualizations.
Battlesnake AI
2024Game AI
A competitive snake-battle agent — server-side strategy that plays a live, visual game.
Adaptive Systems
2024Machine learning
Reinforcement-learning experiments — agents learning, reward curves, the works.
About
The person behind the pixels
I'm Boris van der Kruk, a developer who lives in the messy, fun intersection of code, games, and things that move on a screen.
I build chess engines, agents that play themselves, simulations, and small tools that punch well above their weight. If something can be made interactive, I'll probably try — and then add one more feature than strictly necessary.
This site is part portfolio, part playground. Poke at things. The chess bot genuinely wants a game (and genuinely opens with the Bongcloud).
- Based inThe Netherlands
- FocusAI · interactive · tools
- LanguagesPython · TypeScript · C++
- CurrentlyMaking bots misplay chess