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 ] 2005 - Porting an Atari tax program to Delphi My mom made me take side-jobs from age 13 and that's something that I'm really grateful for. It gave me a good work ethic and plenty of money for a kid, but I always spent it right away and was never able to save any. I started delivering newspapers, and then graduated to baking bread at the Jumbo supermarket. I got fired after a year because I overslept one too many times, and had to find something new. My friend Marijke from school had a neighbor, George, who was 18 and was starting a computer repair business. He was entrepreneurial and studied next to this full-time job. He also played in a band. He had so much energy. She recommended me to him because I was doing things with computers all the time. I was 15. The pay was terrible but I loved the work. I started with 4 hours per week, but by the time...

[ 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 ] 2004 - The HP 49g In secondary school, everyone that did "advanced" maths had to get a TI 83+ calculator. Being an "HP family", my dad bought me an HP 49g+ calculator with RPN. I loved that thing. Going against the grain and doing things differently is very important to me. Here I had to get special permission from school to use this device because it was not the approved crappy TI calculator. Luckily I had a really cool maths teacher (hello Mr. Pieke!) and he made it happen. I loved RPN and stack-based programming. I created all kinds of small programs in User RPL. On holidays I would be programming stuff in my tent. On hpcalc.org I downloaded all kinds of knowledge bases for e.g. the periodic table and loved reading things from the calculator. The calculator broke down at some point, then I bought a 49g+, but that was stolen from my ...

[ 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 ] 2009 - SnelTrein While I was off studying Computer Science the smartphone revolution kicked off. Being an Apple hater, I got the first Android phone I could get my hands on: the T-mobile G1. Loved it and still think killing physical foldable keyboards was a shame. I had all kinds of ideas for apps, for some reason most of them revolved around trains. Like a GPS alarm clock that would wake you up when you got close to your destination. I traveled by train a lot, and planning a trip or checking train times was a pain. I decided to build a train times app, but the name Trein was already taken, so I named mine SnelTrein. The Dutch name for high-speed trains. It was a simple wrapper around the mobile website of the NS (Dutch Railways). My app was super fast and super simple in the UI, as it remembered your trips. Your most often used trips were always on top. ...