Software etc.

[ This is a part of " The Software That I Love ", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ] 2018 - Mendix Cloud v4 - Part 2 - How to launch a complicated product Note : This was a multi-year mega project (at least for my standards) and ran from about 2015 till 2018 when I left Mendix. It's still one of my proudest professional achievements. If you haven't yet, read part 1 about Cloud v4 . During 2017/2018 our team was doing a lot of things at the same time: Handle the operational fires in Mendix Cloud v1/v2/v3. Add new hardware with 50%-100% YoY growth, as well as handle all kinds of customer requests, like resizing VMs or adding more storage. These were all manual operations by our engineers. Migrate v1/v2 apps to v3 to ensure standardization. Build v4 which would make everything standard, scalable and self-service. It would be the solution to solve the chaos from v1/v2/v3. Fires? What fires? Running a 24/7 hosting operation for custome...

[ This is a part of " The Software That I Love ", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ] 2005 - Dat Narrenschip Around 2005 I started creating a website for my friend Jaap who deals in antique maps at datnarrenschip.nl I wrote most of this here: see How we ended up owning a framing shop next :  2005 - Porting an Atari tax program to Delphi previous :  2004 - The HP 49g

As of last year my wife manages her art framing shop in Soest . It's an interesting business and here's how we ended up owning it. Shortly after taking over the framing shop, the local newspaper wrote an article about it. When I was 16 and living in Middelburg my mom introduced me to a bit of an odd man. His kids went to the same school as my siblings and his wife told my mom they needed a new website. My mom suggested I could help because I was always on my computer and she wanted me to do something useful. Thanks mom! Jaap (as he was called) smoked a lot, had long hair, and always listened to hippie music like Pink Floyd. Most importantly, he had a lot of interesting antique maps which he dealt in. His passion for the maps and the stories he told about them were incredible. His knowledge is encyclopedic, he can tell you exactly which edition of a map it is by subtle variations in the paper. I really liked him and we are friends to this day. One of the maps he showed me was on...