Alef Arendsen

I’m half way done with my little tour d’Europe as I write this from Rome, Italy. I’m here for a Core Spring course that lasts until coming Friday and will be heading back up to Valle di Gressoney after I finish here.

I drove down to our little place in the mountains last Thursday. I just *had* to get one a bit more skiing (or actually snowboarding) done this season, as the snow was so unbelievably good this year. So I left early morning from Utrecht to arrive late in the afternoon hoping to find the road to the house without snow. It all started very promising when I entered Valle d’Aosta. It was about 20 degrees Celsius down in Pont St. Martin and the drive up to the private road alongside which our house is was snow free a pretty long way. But then something unexpected happened. I found all kinds of trees lying across the road. They must have fallen under the weight of all the snow. So even though there was hardly any snow, I still couldn’t get up to the house by car and had to walk up again. I also did this in December and January. Whereas the last two times it took 30 minutes (December) up to more than an hour (January), this time it was easy to get up with the total walk taking only 20 minutes.

Friday and Saturday I did some snowboarding with Friday being kind cloudy and misty all the time and Saturday being an total blast. Nothing but sun and great conditions (although the snow is definitely not as powder’y as before).

Saturday night I went to Milan to hang out with some friends and after having a great pranzo (lunch) in Sesto San Giovanni (close to Milan) I went back up to Valle di Gressoney Sunday late afternoon.

At first, I was planning to go up to Staffal to ski again, but then I came up with a better plan. The weather was very nice without wind, and very clear sight, so I decided I’d try to climb up to Bec di Nona. Bec di Nona is a little pass straight up from our house reaching up to 2000 meter and should provide some great views over Valle d’Aosta on the one side and possibly Ivrea and the Piemonte area on the other side. The (current) background of this blog by the way is a picture of Bec di Nona taken this winter. A friend of mine and I have been there before in summer, but back then there wasn’t any clear sight. I took my backpack and went straight up. After 1 hour of walking I arrived at the area where the steepest climb began and this is also where you could clearly see the avalanches that had been wrecking the area.

I decided to steer clear of the avalanche slide path (that usually is a good idea I’ve been told ) and continued my climb upwards. About 50 meters below the top however I unfortunately had to turn back. The snow was getting too deep. The powder underneath was covered with a thick layer of ice and packed snow after some probing I came to the conclusion that the powder still way too deep to continue the last bits upward. There were also various layers of crust in the snow, which supposedly adds to the danger of snow starting to slide. Don’t want to get caught underneath a pack of powder I would say . Dissappointed I turned back to the house after having some fun sliding down the hills (no avalanche danger there, the snow was only about 20 to 30 centimers thick there with limited inclination). I arrived back at the house using a different route and ended up in our backyard, where I took a few pictures.

Later that day I drove down to Turin where I took a flight to Rome. This is where I am right now. I’m having some great fun giving a Core Spring course here with 12 people and after I’m done I’m taking a flight back up again to Turin to spend another day in the mountains. Then I’m off to Switzerland to visit a friend on Sunday. Monday I’ll be back home again.

p.s. although I did actually read a fair bit about avalanches before I drove down to Italy last week, this little tour made me decide to spend some more time reading up on the subject. Although it’s probably only going to be useful next season it’s a very interesting matter…

I just got this from Andrew Phillips (thanks dude). A great movie about Media Lab’s inventions in the field of augmented reality.

Funny little detail. At 7:12, the guy pulls out his KLM boarding pass. First, I don’t have a clue how you end up with a boarding pass like that when you’re not at the airport already, but other than that, it’s not the promotion that KLM wants I think: the flight is delayed for 20 minutes

As the video shows, the off-piste conditions in Gressoney this year were great. This wasn’t the only time the conditions where that good. It’s been snowing like crazy pretty much all of December and January. I haven’t kept track of the conditions in February, but last snowfall was March 5, about 40 centimeters.

I have to be in Rome for work the week after next, and I’m stopping by in Valle di Gressoney on my way down (driving to Perloz, then taking a flight from Turin). I’m thinking about taking my little videocamera so I can get some action shots done as well.

Also, I’m hoping the road to the house is going to be accessible (by car), so I don’t have to walk up all the way. Well, we’ll see…

A while ago I blogged about Wouter and me going to Cabo Verde for a week’s worth of kiteboarding. Well, actually last week, and I can tell you: it was awesome.

We took the train to Schiphol airport late in the afternoon. Our flight was leaving at about 7pm. On the way to Cabo Verde we didn’t have any problems with the almost 50kg of luggage we had. I also had hand luggage that amounted to about 15kg, but before we checked it, we’d stashed our hand luggage in a locker first so that they check-in lady wouldn’t see it. This worked. We arrived Friday late at night at the international airport of Sal, one of the islands in the region a
and quickly took a taxi to hotel Odjo d’Agua.

We quickly went to bed, because the day after, the fun would start. Wind predictions were good and we didn’t want to waste any minute on the water. What followed were 7 very boring days if you first look at it, but to us it was total paradise. Pretty much every day (starting Saturday) we got up about about 8am, had a big breakfast (consisting of eggs, bread yoghurt, lots of fruits, lots of tea and juice and more bread). Next, we got a taxi at about 10am to arrive at kite beach usually at 10.10am. We kited every day until about 5.30 and went home to take a shower. Afterwards, we’d go out for dinner followed by bed at about 9.30pm.

Obviously the fun of the day was between 10.10am and 5.30pm. Every minute on the water was great. Saturday we started with about 15 – 18 knots of wind, which was quite okay. Sunday and Monday were a bit stronger with about 17 – 20 knots of wind. Usually in the afternoon the winds would die down a knot or two, but that wasn’t a big deal, because both Wouter and me had brought big kites as well. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were awesome. The winds were constantly between 25 and 30 knots these days and the swell was awesome (although kite beach is basically on the wrong part of the island to get really big swells). We pretty much kited like maniacs in these winds; to such an extent that on Wednesday night I actually felt pretty sick. Feeling sick or not, it didn’t really matter, because the next morning, it was the same routine: breakfast, taxi, rigging up and heading out… Adrenaline would start flowing as soon as we hit the water and then all pain would be gone again.

A few random thoughts about Sal and this trip:

• Never forget to put on sun screen if you’re that close to the equator. I forgot to do it the first day and it almost ruined my entire holiday
• Don’t forget to bring sun screen. We bought one bottle (because we ran out) and it cost us €40,=!
• Don’t expect anything of the island except for wind, sand and sun. There’s simply nothing else!
• Don’t rent a car, you don’t need it, taking a taxi to and from kite beach is quick enough

More pictures from this trip on Picasa.

A while ago somebody recommended me the book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson. I can’t remember who it was; what I do know is that reading the book made an impact. It kind of reinforced something that I always believed in: change is good.

I won’t say reading that little book let to my decision to change things drastically (work-wise speaking), but it did help.

“Change things?” you may ask? Well, yes, because after having worked for SpringSource since the beginning of 2005 (so that’s 4 years actually), I’ve decided to quit. It’s been quite ride and a lot of great fun, but it’s time for something new. Since many people have met me during those 4 years as a guy always promoting, training and consulting on Spring technologies, I thought I should put out a bit of an explanation. Before I move on; I’m still involved with SpringSource and Spring and will be for (hopefully) a long time to come–not on a day-to-day basis anymore however.

To give you a bit of background: I joined the Spring development team somewhere in 2003 after having worked with the technology shortly as a (quite excited) user. SpringSource was founded end of 2004 in London. Joost, Steven, Leonard and me quickly followed suit by setting up the Dutch branch early 2005. Since then, things have gone quite rapidly: we secured a round of funding in 2007, moved our headquarters to San Mateo, California, acquired Covalent a few months later, secured another round of funding in 2008 and had the G2One (Groovy & Grails) guys join the fun later that year. We’re well over a 100 people now at SpringSource and it’s going quite well.

I think Spring is one of the examples of how to build a good product. Over the years, I’ve grown to believe that the only way of building a good product is by involving users and listening to what problems they really face and what feedback they are giving you. In the Spring development team and later on at SpringSource we’ve always done that and are still doing that. Combine the input you get from the users with a bunch of very (I say very) talented people such as Juergen, Rod, Arjen, Rob, Adrian, Thomas, Costin and Mark (and MarkF and MarkT…) to have them work on building Spring… and the rest is history they say. By the way, I know, by naming only a few people, I’m omitting all the others, but then again, you know who you are!! Again, these people I listed above may have done the bulk of the actual programming, don’t forget the value of the community. People like Matt Raible, Chris Richardson, Roland Nelson, Craig Walls, the New York Java Consultant (can’t remember your name dude) and many many others have proved invaluable. Yes, again I’m making that same mistake again, but these were just the ones that came to mind. In other words, in the past few years, I’ve grown to understand the real power of community-driven (software) development and to my mind, SpringSource is one of the leaders in this space.

Back to myself: in all these years, I’ve been traveling like crazy, have probably trained more than 500 people using Spring, have consulting with many Fortune1000 clients of ours and have spoken at many conferences. Late 2008 I had five conference-type engagements in a row. Copenhagen was followed by Malmø and Miami. The last trip was to Tel Aviv to join in the JavaEdge conference, organized by the great bunch of people that call themselves AlphaCSP. What struck me when in Miami was that I had kind of been absorbed by all this travel, the speaking engagements and all that and had forgotten about some of the other stuff that makes me tick. The travel is great, the speaking even better and what was unforgettable was when people went back home being inspired about a piece of technology that’d help them be more productive. But…

What got lost (for me personally) though over the past few years is working with a team to achieve great results. This is what has always greatly motivated me. At SpringSource, although we’re working quite closely together (and yes, the company is one big team–I’ve been amazed by how well a distributed company can work), I have been focused more and more on the consulting-type engagements. Although there are a lot of nice people I met doing the things I did the last few years, I do really miss the fact of having an office filled with a a nice bunch of co-workers (SpringSource co-workers: please read on).

One other thing I missed was the entrepreneurial side of things. Together with long-time friend Joost, I started JTeam in 2002 and a few years later started the Dutch branch of (back then) Interface21. Setting up a business, being creative about everything you do, finding new ways of getting clients, delivering results, hiring good people, motivating the team; these are all things I did, but slowly faded away in the last few years. That’s something I don’t blame anybody for, it’s just the way it is.

So, there I was, feeling ultimately lucky that I have been able to be part of this ultimately talented group of people that brought Spring (well, and all the other stuff, such as Aspect, Apache Tomcat, and more) to the world and are on their way to bring out lots more good stuff (have you seen Spring Integration, it really rocks), but at the same time missing something. After giving this a lot of thought, I finally came to the conclusion that it’s time to move on.

In a later post I’ll highlight what’s next in store for me. In the meantime, my quitting SpringSource (or at least, employment contract) does not mean I’m out of the picture. I’ll remain involved (tho’ on a less time-intensive basis) and will still be advocating Spring technologies here and there (yes guys, if you don’t mind, I’m still coming to Sardegna and Genova and Cracow).

For those of you that would like to get in touch with me (I can imagine you may have questions about the above), you can do so via this blog or via my personal email address (firstname at lastname dot net). Anything SpringSource-related, I’ll forward you to the appropriate person. Alternatively, you can also directly contact Peter Meijer (at firstname dot lastname at springsource dot com).

A last word to all you SpringSource guys (alhtough I’m not gone): I’ll miss you!!