Finally I made this one, after having a blog for more than two years and an ‘about page’ for the same amount of time on my ‘todo’ list.
A brief history.
My lifecycle starts in 1969, in Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands. A place where they still celebrate carnival for four days and that’s something I did from the day I could walk. After a rich and long secondary school career [three different schools on three different levels] I started studying Physics in Eindhoven, but had to stop after a year due to an accident. That accident had a major impact on my life; I was burned for almost 30% with about 10% third degree burns which needed transplantations [my lifecycle was almost ended]. Anyway, I survived and started studying Civil Engineering, a typically Dutch study. During that study actually already during the Physics year I got passionate by computers. Did a lot with 3D modeling and AutoLisp [ a dialect of Lisp ], attached strength calculations to models and that kind of things. For my grade [around 1992] I made a program for bridge design calculations, very fun project.
My work career start.
I could start working for the government as a civil engineer, but choose not to. Computers attracted me more than the drawing board. So, I started to work for a small private investor and was responsible for the complete automation, from the network till the programs [made most of them self] for the brokers. After, or actually during this period I started my own company. I made programs for small and medium sized companies. I had this company for two years and actually didn’t earn a penny. I’m definitely not a sales person and asked to less money for the solutions. So, it was time to go on and look for a ‘real’ job. After some investigation I decided to give it a try at Sogeti, the main reason; they offer create courses for their employees.Shortly after my start at Sogeti I [re-]met Vicky in Amsterdam which I already knew for many years [We celebrated last year that we know each other 25 years] and I never left Amsterdam again, actually we moved to Amstelveen when our son, Abel, was born.
Now.
After 6,5 years [2009] I’m still an employee at Sogeti at this moment in the roll of management consultant for the division Distributed Software Engineering. The past year half of my time was filled with writing a book about Collaboration in the Cloud [public available somewhere in March’09], the other half I worked on our ALM vision and how VSTS2010 can support our ALM ideas.