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Education
- V.W.O. (pre-university education) from 1979 to 1985, average grade 7.7 (out of 10 - good for the third rank of my year) over the subjects Dutch, English, Mathematics I and II, Physics, Chemistry, Music;
- <a href=http://www.nijenrode.nl/>Nijenrode Bussiness School</a> from 1985 until 1989, when the school and I decided that Bussiness Administration was not my primary interest.
- Lots of self-education and small courses, see
Skills section.
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Work experience
- Founder of tric, a startup that is meant to slowly grow into a top-notch ICT company by applying some non-standard ideas about how such a company might work. As this is a bit of an experiment, I take a long-term view of setting this up.
- Technical director and co-founder of The InternetOne N.V., a full-service Internet provider / hosting integrator that is currently rolling out over Europe and Latin-America. Responsible for R&D, ICT, and finance. Responsible for implementing a hosting environment and on-line provisioning with minimal means by applying top-notch tools. As technical director of a joint-venture with partners in Belgium, 444.NET N.V., responsible for creation and deployment of a yellow-pages type business search engine in record time.
- Until November 2000 CTO of Acriter Software, a Java startup that first was active in consulting, and then converted itself to an independent software vendor that produced Acriter/BMS, an integrated solution for business management. I was responsible for the architecture of the product and the realization of their Jini-based distributed application server, and also played a key role in introducing agile development methods (<font size=-1>note: about 9 months after I left, Acriter failed to make its second-round financing and folded</font>).
- In January 1995, I joined <A href=http://www.openlinksw.com>OpenLink Software, Inc.</a> as Principal Consultant. The main reason was that they gave me the opportunity to do more of a R&D style of programming, as opposed to working according to exact customer specifications, which was interesting to do for a couple of years, but wasn't very satisfactory in the long run. They failed to follow up on their promises, however, which is the reason I left them in October 1997. Among others, I was responsible for the world's first type 3 JDBC driver and some interesting enhancements to the OpenLink multi-tier ODBC product like proxying of ODBC connections and a proof-of-concept for wat later became the WebConfigurator. The OpenLink VMS and Macintosh ports (from Unix and Windows sourcecode) were done by me, as was the implementation of DECnet support.
- I got an irresistable offer from <a href=http://www.sidata.de/>sidata GmbH</a> which made me emigrate to Germany in 1991. sidata was a small company dedicated to Uniface custom development, and I learned a great deal more about Unix, about VMS, and about a number of RDBMSes (mainly Oracle and Sybase). My major project was with one of the large pharmaceutical companies in Basel, Switzerland, where I participated in a project team developing software for managing results of chemical analyses on new products. As we worked in an R&D environment that was subject to (among others) FDA rules, this assignment really taught me a lot about quality assurance. Apart from this project, I was responsible for system management within sidata and had a lot of short involvements with other projects when colleagues needed my skills. During an office move, I designed and implemented one of the first fully modular office networks in Switzerland.
- In 1990, I joined SyCo MG B.V.(now GMT B.V.), a company specialized in custom development with Progress/4GL, mainly under Xenix. I was hooked to Unix immediately, and spent a fair amount of my spare time on porting all kinds of (GNU) utilities to this system. Among others, my main project here was a complete system for a wholesale bussiness in spare parts of all kinds of household appliances, from order entry to inventory.
- Self employed for a short time after University. During that time I
completed some projects with a self-made C toolkit under MS-DOS:
- A customs document handling system for a bonded warehouse;
- Document software for a small company in meat im- and export; </ul>
- During University, assistent in the computer center, mainly busy with
PC support. Did some C programming and applications integration for the
University's financial department as well;
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Skills/knowledge
General
- I have experience in the area of banking (NL and CH), pharmaceuticals, local government (CH), national semi-government (D), trade (NL, D), and financial markets (NL).
- Broad knowledge of business topics and quantitative methods ranging from project management to finance. Active experience in finance as director responsible for finance of two N.V.'s.
- Since the second half of 2000, a large part of my job consisted of playing the role of XP team coach. I endorse this development philosophy and am willing to play this role in other projects.
- Risk-taker, enterpreneur, quick to make decisions. I excel when the house is on fire and I work best in a continuously changing environment.
- Fanatical commitment to quality (to the extent that yes, it sometimes
gets in the way).
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Technical
- Coaching
- Since 1998 I have worked on and off as development team coach using agile development methods like eXtreme Programming and Scrum. Since May 2006 I'm a Certified Scrum Master, and coaching is currently my main job.
- Programming languages
- Currently specialized in Smalltalk, Java, C, Python. Exposure to lots of other languages, I like to learn one or two new languages per year. I know lots of specialized languages, like SQL, SGML/XML, various Unix mini-languages, etcetera. Used to be an expert in Postgres/4GL, Uniface/4GL, C++, DEC Pascal. Project preferences: Smalltalk, Python, Java (in that order). I have worked with object-oriented languages since the late '80.
- Platforms
- To the lowest levels: Unix varying from Xenix to Ultrix to Linux, VMS, MS-DOS (including Intel assembly), MacOS; MS Windows (and descendants) to a lesser extent (some smaller projects, mostly on the application level, sometimes system level). Worked on Wang's Basic-2, CP/M, RSX and RSTS/E, PrimOS. Unix-based systems are my favorite, I have been running Linux at home since 1993. Knowledge of numerous system management and system-level tools on Linux for keeping server farms running: daemontools/ucspi-tcp, Linux Virtual Server/heartbeat/ldirectord, OpenAFS, MRTG, netsaint, etcetera.
- Databases
- Good working knowledge of Oracle and Sybase, I administered installations of both (albeit it's getting a little rusty). Progress (a long time ago) was once a specialization. Exposure to and worked with Ingres, Informix, mySQL, and Postgres. Good command of SQL, various procedural extensions to the language (like PL/SQL), and of 3GL interfaces (ODBC, JDBC). I designed and implemented a persistence engine with transactions, a JDBC driver and an object/relational mapping layer so I know quite a bit about the lower levels as well.
- Networking
- Expert knowledge of TCP/IP, including most of its subprotocols (FTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, Telnet, ...). Programmed SPX and DECnet (on Windows and VMS), administered and worked with X.25 via VAX/PSI. Thorough knowledge of networking topics like routing, firewalling, security, encryption, etcetera. Working experience with SunRPC and DCE, exposure to CORBA, Tivoli, Firewall-1, SunScreen. I have written a fully functional object broker in 1995. Expert in RMI and Jini.
Other activities
- I maintain various Open Source software packages. Open Source is a very sound development model, and this allows me to keep in touch with the Open Source community.
- I served as a member of the Jini community Technology Oversight Committee, which is the first body outside Sun that was created to "communitize" Sun's Jini Technology.
- Since May 2005, I am a member of the Squeak Foundation Board, a group of people that aims to pave the way for the further development of the Squeak system, a Smalltalk-based development environment that is most closely aligned with the goals of the original Xerox PARC-based team that invented Smalltalk and object-oriented programming.
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Miscellaneous
- Thanks to my working in several European countries, I can say that (even for a Dutchman) I have an above-average knowledge of foreign languages, especially English and German, in which I consider myself fluent.
- Nijenrode University puts a great emphasis on the development of social skills, by integrating life on campus and membership of the students' club into its otherwise already broad curriculum. Although I didn't finish my BBA, I learned a great deal not only about Bussiness Administration, but especially about social skills.
- Services lists some short case studies and my current professional preferences. </ul>