Over mij
My twinsister Mirjam and I were born in a hospital in Emmen, which is a small town in the north east of Holland. We were raised by our loving parents in Klazienaveen, an even smaller town 10 kilometers from Emmen. I had a really nice childhood there, but when I grew older I wanted to see something more of the world.
When I was old enough, I studied computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Twente in Enschede which I completed with a research project in Dunedin, New Zealand (which was pretty cool). After I graduated I worked as a junior consultant for Utopics in Amersfoort for a year. Then I worked a couple of years as a Java developer at the UMCG in Groningen, which is a big academic hospital in the north of Holland.
Currently I am living in Stadskanaal with my girlfriend Annemarie and our beautiful baby daughter Norah. I work for Wisdom, a software company in Groningen which specializes in internet applications in Java and .NET. I was hired as a senior Java developer and consultant, but lately I am more into dynamic languages like Ruby and frameworks like Ruby on Rails. I really have tried to convince my colleagues and customers of the benefits of a framework like Ruby on Rails (faster development and happier developers) and a couple of months ago one of my colleagues and I did our first project (http://www.autocircuit.nl). Rails was a joy to work with and the project was a big succes. It was quite a drag to work on a Java project, after the project finished …
My professional interests are very broad, but at the moment I am mainly interested in technologies and ideas that make the web a more friendly and open place: OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, Microformats, RSS, RESTful webservices etc.
In my spare time I like to read, play on my guitar and work in our little organic garden where I try to grow some vegatables and fruit. I am very interested in Permacultue, a really nice philosophy for organic gardening but also for live in general. I really enjoyed Aikido for a couple of years. At the moment I am not practicing Aikido anymore though, because of an injury with my neck which I got from an accident while skiing.
I hope you enjoy reading my weblog. Please feel free to comment when you want.
