|
Leiden, The Netherlands.
I'm currently a training course developer for MySQL AB
I've got a Master's in Molecular Biology
It must've been in 2003 or 2004. At the time I was a professional
application developer, mainly building intranet applications based on
an Oracle database server. I was boasting to a friend about what a
great DB oracle was, and the PL/SQL gateway allowed us to create XML
pages which we could render in the browser using XSLT, thanks to
Internet Explorer.
So he said, "Oh, yeah, I think I understand...you mean something like MySQL +
PHP?" and "...did you know, Mozilla does that XSLT thing too?"
Well, at first I was very skeptical. I just couldn't believe that all
this technology I was using and for which my customers were paying
hefty sums could in principle have been replaced by this alternative,
completely free of charge. I just kept thinking..."ok, so where's the
catch?". But the catch never came, and later I found out that a core
component in the architecture I was using, the Oracle HTTP Server, was
actually itself based completely off an open source product (namely
the Apache HTTP Server).
So this was an important milestone for me, discovering that a
particular component that I have put a lot of trust in because it was
branded "Oracle" was actually open source optima forma. It opened my
eyes, and I started seriously considering open source solutions for my
daily work, looking for opportunities to use it.
I am not directly involved in any development. I once did some
translation work for Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle). In addition, I
wrote a number of articles on my blog about Kettle and Pentaho.
I am currently working on a new article to explain Pentaho
metadata and ad-hoc reporting.
Another project I am currently involved
in is IMBI. For this project, a few former colleagues (all with
a BI background) and I, are building an open source BI solution on the data
set of the Internet Movie Database. The main purpose of this project
is to educate ourselves and the goal is to end up with a reference
implementation for demonstration purposes. When we succeed we will
report our findings back hoping they might be of use to others.
I guess you could say I am pretty active in the MySQL community. In
fact, I got so involved there, and I was spending so much time on
that, that it made most sense to try and get a job there. And thus it
happened. I joined MySQL in july 2006, and this was one of the best
decisions I made in my professional career. One of the projects I try to
focus on in my spare time is "The UDF Repository for MySQL", which is
an open source community project to deliver highly performing
pluggable (aggregate) functions for the MySQL database.
I try to spend a lot of time with my family. My wife and I have three
kids so I play with them a lot. Apart from that, I love to read books,
watch movies and listen to music. I also spend a lot of time on hobby
computing and writing technical articles.
At some point I aspired to become a professional musical composer. In
the last year of my biology studies, I applied at the conservatory. My
application completely divided the jury. The outcome: I was allowed a
test-year, which allowed me to follow composition lessons and gain
some music theoretical skills. I guess the most important thing I
learned there is that it's probably best for me as well as for others
that music remain a hobby of mine rather than pursue it
professionally. But, it was a great experience for me personally, and
I am glad I tried.
|
Thanks for making the Pentaho open source project successful,