Technical interests
2022-12-24
Enough with all the fluff, let's give a somewhat chronological overview of what my computer-related interests have been over the years.
The beginning
It al began in 1983 when I got a Phillips Videopac G7000. Altough I spent most of my time playing games on it, I also had a cartridge that let me make my first programs. In assembly language, no less. The programs where limited to 99 instructions but I learned about binary and hexadecimal numbers, boolean logic and control flow. The seed was planted!
A few years later, the Commodore 64 entered our home. And with it came Commodore Basic: GOTO, peek and poke. Structured programming also revealed itself to me in the guise of Pascal; with a compiler and linker on two different floppies.
In 1987 modernity took hold in the form of a PC clone, the Amstrad PC1512. Turbo Pascal became my weapon of choice. And I got used to keyboard macros in WordPerfect and WordStar. I got familiar with Spreadsheet and database programming with Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III+ respectively. The university years
Pure informatics seemed a bit dull to 18-year old me, so as to keep a maximum of options open, I enrolled in the Applied Science degree at the University of Ghent. Since a Computer Science masters wasn't offered yet in 1991, I opted for Electronics. In my last masters year, a CS degree was introduced. I took the jump and I became the first CS Engineer to graduate at the University of Ghent.
Since most of my formal education was about mathematics, electromagnetism and electronics I continued my tradition of self study and got immersed in Object Oriented programming. First with Turbo Pascal and later with Turbo C++.
After 5 years of studying, I didn't feel quite ready to enter “the industry”, so I began working at the university for 4 more years as a teaching assistant to the late professor G. Hoffman. I helped with courses such as “Programming II” (C & C++), “Analysis & design” (UML) and, my favourite, “Formal Methods” (with prof. R. Boute).
During those 4 years, the world of Linux opened itself to me. As well, the Internet finally came to my desk at a whopping 2kBips! Programming-wise, it was still mostly C++ and some Perl. But in the later years, also Java made its debut.
Working as an employee
In 1998, INNOCOM was founded as a collaboration of private capital with the academic world and it's there and then that I began my life as a technology consultant. I worked at INNOCOM for 9 years and, being such a young company, I wore several hats: architect, application designer and implementer, technical team and practice lead and responsible for internal IT. I got the opportunity to work for many distinct customers. Both SME's and industry- leading multinationals.
Technology-wise, it was mostly Java, Linux, Apache, mySql and Perl but there was also a fair bit of work related to the Microsoft platform with J++, ASP, COM+, SqlServer and IIS.
While working at Toyota, I also got to immerse myself in mainframe technologies such as JCL, DB2 and SQLJ in combination with the J2EE stack.
Self employed
In 2007, I started my own one-man consultancy business. Initially, I continued the same line of work as at Inno.com. However, my true passion is in hands-on solving technical challenges, so I gradually moved from architecture consultancy to application design and implementation.
Not long after my switch to self-employment, I discovered Scala and functional programming. Initially, it was more an intellectual pursuit, but this evolved to my main professional specialisation. Through self-study, my knowledge of functional programming was further deepened by using the excellent fp-ts library with TypeScript.
During this period, I witnessed the rise of the cloud, and I got to “play” with the Amazon and Google cloud offerings from their beginnings. Related technologies breaking into the mainstream were Big Data and Machine Learning, which I gained experience with working for Sony and through self-study.
Additional computer languages that I used along the way were Bash, Elm, Groovy, Haskell, Nix, Octave, Python, R, and Ruby.
Some of the notable tooling and platforms were Android, Angular, Bamboo, Docker, ElasticSearch, etcd, git, Jenkins, Kubernetes, MapReduce, Nix, RStudio, RxJava, RxJs, and RxScala.
CV
A more factual listing of the projects I participated in can be found in my abbreviated CV or my comprehensive CV.
