The software that I love

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What are you proud of? When interviewing candidates I always ask "tell me something that you are proud of." Sometimes you get a blank stare. That person is probably down and dealing with some crap. Luckily most of the time the eyes of the candidate light up and the person starts talking about themselves at their best. I love those moments. As in Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1", I want to see the best in people and then see if we can deal with the bad. In the end, I ask "so this is all great, but what will we have to learn to live with if we hire you?". On the one hand I'd like to prepare myself, but the question tests for self-reflection too. It works well.

But back to proud. In the end of 2022 I was not in the best place either, and there were a bit more downs than ups. This blog post/diary was a way to make my eyes sparkle and remind myself of the things I had built and still loved. These are short stories about pieces of software, and what happened to the people or the companies surrounding the software when it got made, in chronological order. There's a lot more to life than software, but this focused format is simple and it works. I might write more stories about the same time periods from different perspectives in other posts. I've written this mostly for myself, but if you enjoy it, that's all the better.

These stories are how I remember them. My memory isn't amazing and in most of the events I only had a small part with a limited perspective. If you have additions, questions or other feedback, send me a message at jouke@waleson.com.

Note 1: This is a work in progress and will be updated when I have time.

Note 2: Wow, this post got long but also popular. It had over 10k views on day 1.

Note 3: I've now split up the parts as separate blog posts, as it was easier to link to them that way.

Part 1 - Fun but somewhat forced programming ('96-'00)

Here my dad "encouraged me" to go into programming, something which I'm really grateful for.

Part 2 - High School & Uni ('00-'11)

During my high school and university years I didn't do much programming projects (but of course a lot of mandatory computer science work).

Part 3 - The Mendix Years ('11-'18)

In 2011 when I was about 23 I luckily found Mendix and got hired as a junior cloud engineer. What a ride this turned out to be! In 2018 I left after being a Product Manager and having built Cloud v4 with the team.

Part 4 - CTO @ easee ('18-'23)

At easee I was the CTO. We built an online eye exam and got it CE certified. I learned a lot about management, leading teams, certifications.

I'm now doing a lot of things that are still under NDA, but this series will get updated in the future.

Comments

  1. RobertOctober 2, 2022 at 10:05 PM

    a great read, an insightful as well ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arslan FarooqOctober 3, 2022 at 4:52 PM

    This is an excellent read, thank you for sharing your journey :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yevgen AntymyrovOctober 3, 2022 at 5:31 PM

    Man, thanks for the SnelTrein app, there was a time when it was the only way to see the schedules.

    ReplyDelete

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