Resume

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;
Nijenrode Bussiness School 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.

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 (note: about 9 months after I left, Acriter failed to make its second-round financing and folded).
In January 1995, I joined OpenLink Software, Inc. 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 sidata GmbH 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;

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;

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).

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.

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.