Alef Arendsen

Traffic killed me the past seven days. I though taking planes, trains, taxis and subways was terrible, and would have hoped that since I’m back in Holland I could occasionally take the car again, but I’ve been cured already, in just little over a month.

Last Friday the winds were on near the beach. The direction was north-east, meaning it’s almost off shore. I still took my chances and it worked out just fine. It took me about 2 hours to get to Wijk aan Zee though, due to very heavy taffic (on a Friday afternoon!!). Normally it takes only 1 hour…

Saturday my buddy Marc called me and suggested we go to Strand Horst, which is close to my parents’ place. We got some real good kiting done there too. Wouter was also present and showed us his new Genetrix Hydra 12sqm kite. It’s a pretty unknown brand, but what a beauty. Too bad Wouter had his toming wrong, so couldn’t really generate enough power to take off… I used my 12sqm and my 10sqm and had a lot of fun and some big airs. Too bad I tore my 10sqm a bit, so I’m going to have to get that one repaired.

On Monday, I didn’t expect anything spectacular, but around 6.30, Marc called me to say he was going to get a session done at Stichtse Brug, which is about 15 minutes from my place. I immediately took the car and tried to get there. Too bad traffic got after me again(!). This time is was road works that prevented me from taking the highway… It took me 30 minutes and with the sun going down and the wind picking up it was pretty annoying to see time go by while in traffic… In the end still got a good session done. It ended with me doing a pretty big air with some (unplanned) 720 in there, after which my kite inverted and I had to swim back to shore. Oh well, it’s all in the game

On Monday the world also saw the news of Oracle acquiring Sun. I did a short blog entry about that over at the JTeam blog about my personal opinions on that. Pretty exciting news!

On Tuesday I figured that if I would ever have to give up kiting, I would try taking on the stuff Danny Mac does. The movie below is really cool!

The remainder of the week traffic continued to kill me. I had to drive back and forth to the convention center in Utrecht today and that took me about 45 minutes each way, while it’s only 15 minutes by foot

It seems I’m on a blogging spree the last few days… This is not without reason. One of our key activities at JTeam is to tell the world about what we’re doing. We’ve always been present at various conferences, both as speakers and as attendees and various people have always blogged about what they were up to. Recently, we decided to set up a company blog. We successfully used a company blog at SpringSource to communicate all things relevant to us and the community, varying from technical articles, to entries about our strategy.

I’m in no way aiming to get the JTeam blog as many readers as the SpringSource blog, but it’s very nice to have a central communication mechanism to let you know what we’re up to. Then again, I guess I don’t have to convince you of the power of blogs now, do I?

Another thing we’ve always done and are just now starting to give a little bit more attention is the occasional event where we share our ideas and discuss things with clients and other interested parties.

Our latest initiative in this area is the Search Symposium we are organizing in the beginning of June. I just blogged about this and if you’re interested in this symposium, please continue to read there.

Last but not least, yesterday I got in touch with an old friend at the Financiële Dagblad (the Dutch version of the Financial Times). He did a short interview with me about my move to JTeam and what I’ve been up to in the last ten years. He was triggered by my LinkedIn profile that (since ages) starts with: “In 2002 Joost van de Wijgerd and me set out on a journey to rule the Enterprise Open Source world”. He was curious about whether or not I thought I succeeded… I think this has been the first time my name turns up on a newspaper that is not dedicated to technology and I was quite happy with that (not with the picture that he put in, but then again, I didn’t have anything else available yesterday). Unfortunately I can’t copy the article here, you’d have to buy the paper to see what awful picture is in there

Okay, that’s it for the week… It seems the wind is picking up, so I’m going to pack my gear now and race to the for a quick kite session…

I blogged over at the JTeam blog about our use of the BCG Matrix and wet-erase markers.

And yes, I totally agree: real geeks should subscribe to both the JTeam feed as well as the feed for this blog (preventing me from having two post in both blogs), but then again, then I would leave out people that don’t have an RSS reader and nope, I’m not going to teach my mum how to install one

I blogged over at the JTeam blog about the upcoming Java Meetup, June 5th.

Hope to see you there!

Related to the previous blog entry on paint for my house, here’s the suitcase I packed for tomorrow… I just thought I’d share this with you

I was out hunting for paint this week. I’m heading to Italy tomorrow to spend Easter there doing some work on the house. We’ve made some appointments with the local carpenter, the guy installing heating systems and we’re going to paint the floor of the attic. I’ve already done a large part of that, but ran out of paint last time I was there.

Since I bought the paint in Holland (paint and things like that are amazingly expensive in Italy for some obscure reason), I had to get the same brand again (colour differences always screw you over I’ve learnt in the past, so the brand really is important) and yesterday I went by the Gamma (a well-known Dutch shop for things like paint, and other DIY gear). They didn’t have cans in the size I looked for, but boy what a service. They literally called up all the other Gamma stores in the area for my and found out they were out of stock as well. Well, that’s wrong Gamma, just plain wrong. But really, the service rocked. I waited until today so they could maybe get a shipment. In the end, the didn’t, but again, while I was on my way from Amsterdam to Utrecht in my car, they called up all the shops in the vicinity for me to ask which stores still had cans in a smaller size. Three stores had some of those cans, so tonight between 8pm and 9pm I raced by all these stores in all different areas of the city and got myself 11 cans, in total almost 8.5 liters worth of paint. That should do the trick.

Other than Gamma helping me out with all the different locations that still had the paint that I wanted, I noticed the people at the stores were all so incredibly friendly and helpful, it was almost out of this world (or, this country). I still remember a time when I came back from the States (they pretty much invented the whole term customer service) and I was pretty annoyed with the terrible service you get here in the Netherlands. Well, I have to say: the Gamma is at least one exception to that rule. One piece of advice though: restock the paint department!

Tomorrow I’m flying out with all the paint in my suitcase. Fortunately I’m allowed 30 kilos of luggage, due to my flying pretty often, so I guess the weight won’t be that big of a deal. I can imagine myself taking on the paint in the hand luggage… ‘Sir, did you pack any liquids?’

I blogged over at the JTeam Blog about selling agile projects…

I’m by the way not sure if I should keep on mirroring posts here, or maybe just post a link like I’m doing right now. Or maybe even not do anything at all about my posts on the JTeam Blog…

Well, time (or comments) will tell.

As I told you about a month ago, I quit SpringSource, or at least, quit being actively involved as an employee. It was time to move on after having been there since the beginning and having gone through quite a lot of challenges and having worked with so many great people there.

There are two simple reasons for my leaving SpringSource: although the work i did was very exciting, I dearly missed the entrepreneurial aspects in my work and on top of that, although we have a great team at SpringSource, not being able to work side by side with them (I was mainly attending and speaking at conferences, educating people and consulting for clients the last 2 years) kind of bugged me.

When I was in Israel right before the turn of the year, I was lucky enough to attend a great end of year party at a company called AlphaCSP. They’re a great bunch of guys doing really cool stuff and when thinking things over in between Christmas and New Year’s I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be involved with JTeam again.

Joost van de Wijgerd and I started JTeam in 2002 after we had both left SmartHaven, a startup focusing on knowledge management solutions. At first we wanted to call our company The A-Team but quickly decided that would be a little corny, so settled on JTeam as the alternative. After all, the main thing we did was Java.

The idea about what we were planning to with JTeam was (and still is) quite simple:

• build great solutions for customers using state-of-the-art technology,
• in everything we do exceed the expectations of our customers and
• tell the world about what we’re doing.

I can say we succeeded in quite a lot of ways. Since the beginning of 2002, we build quite a number of solutions that have satisfied our customers. On a quite a number of occasions, we exceeded the expectations clients had of those solutions and of the service we are offering and with plenty of people blogging on their personal blogs, writing articles and speaking at conferences, we’ve let the world know we’re there.

The fact that JTeam has continued to do this, although both Joost quit being actively involved on a day-to-day basis starting early mid 2005 or so really satisfies me and I’m very happy that I can be part of this team again. I won’t be involved with JTeam on a full-time basis. I have a list that has some things on it that have been there for way too long already and it the time I’m not working at JTeam’s, I’ll be focusing on some of the items on that list. More about these things later on.

At JTeam, my title officially is Strategic Advisor. This is the result of endless hours of brainstorming about it (not). After first coming up with things like Chief Janitor (I would have liked this myself, but I really am going to more than cleaning the toilets) and Java Guru (yeah, I might know a thing or two about Java, but I think there are people at JTeam that know more in the meantime) we settled for Strategic Advisor. I’m still not really sure what that means. What I do know is that it feels good to be part of this team again and to work with the team to improve the stuff we do even more.

What will I be doing? Well, after having been at JTeam for little over a month now, I can say I haven’t had much time to do serious coding nor do I expect to be doing any of that in the near future. I’ll be mainly focusing on helping clients get more out of JTeam and the technologies we use at JTeam to build all these great solutions.

Of course I have gained quite a lot of experiences during my time at SpringSource with the development of software in an community-driven way, and this experience is definitely something I’m going to use on a day-to-day basis. As Leonard blogged last week the Dutch government has actively started to adopt open source software the last few years and I’ve already had some very fruitful discussions the last few weeks with clients of JTeam about this.

I’ve mirrored this post also on our company blog, to be found at blog.jteam.nl. This is where you will find more posts related to my work at JTeam. If you’re interested in what I’m up to there, please subscribe to that blog too…