Alef Arendsen

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 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…

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!!

Last few years, I’ve organized the Amsterdam Java Meetup on a (pretty much) quarterly basis. The last Java Meetup was somewhere late last year and I haven’t gotten around to planning anything since. It’s about time again, so here goes:

• What: beer, wine and snacks while discussing tech stuff
• When: March 13th, 2009, from 5.30pm onwards
• Where: Grand Cafe de Jaren, de Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam ( http://tinyurl.com/bn5o2b )
• Why: because the first few beers will be free because it’s a nice happening and it’s good to meet each other once every now and then. Maybe we can all start complaining about the credit crunch or so…

Also, after having received many requests, I’ve started a Google Group for the Java Meetup. There, I’ll be announcing future dates for the Java Meetup. Well, I’ll also keep on doing it on this blog and some other places, but if you want to have the dates delivered right to your inbox, please subscribe to the Dutch Developer Meetup Google Group.

You might wonder why the Google Group is not called Amsterdam Java Meetup, but Dutch Developer Meetup instead. Well, I figured we might want to discuss other technologies as well from time to time, so although it still is named the Java Meetup, maybe I’ll just go and rename it somewhere in the future . Also, I don’t want to limit myself to Amsterdam. Maybe there’s a huge developer crowd in Loppersum that we haven’t heard of yet that needs bringing together, which means we have to organize a Loppersum Java Meetup…

In the meantime, if you have ideas about the meetup, want to join, or just want to give your comments, join the group!

JTeam, that other company I still occasionally do some work for, although this has dropped to very-close-to-zero in the last 18 months, has recently hired somebody from Australia or New Zealand (now I’m not sure which one of those it is, but he surely is from somewhere down under ). Anyway, Tim (the Toolman) recently blogged about the 30% ruling and I just have link to his blog entry, because I still think the 30% ruling is one of the examples that the Dutch government is (despite what many people think) capable after all of designing laws that help.

The basic idea is that if you are an internationally sourced employee (as Tim also explains) in certain cases (for example if your skill is hard to come by), you are eligible for a tax cut of about 30% (well, this is not exactly how it works I can remember, but in any case, it’s a decent tax cut). Back in the dot-com days, with SmartHaven we hired numerous expats that could apply for this rule. Obviously Amsterdam was, and still is a attractive place to work so this was a way for SmartHaven to attract some good personnel, despite the difficult market back then.

I Amsterdam.com has a good article on the 30% ruling that should get you started.

In the meantime, I just heard I’m presenting at the JTeam Tech Meeting next June 5 at around dinner time. If you’re up for a good portion of Spring 2.5, don’t hesitate to join! I think pizza and beer are provided!

Jelmer has just installed the latest version of Wordpress on JTeam’s production machine. I still host my blog there and I think they were installing a new web server including the latest and greatest of all the software. Thanks Jelmer.

So now that Wordpress has this tagging stuff built in, I guess I have to go along with the whole Web two dot oooh and rounded corners thing. I’ve just started tagging my posts, in addition to adding categories to them. I’ve also added a cloud of tags, sometimes also called a tag cloud. I’m wondering when that word will make it into the Oxford English Dictionary. And also what the Dutch translation will be: ‘label wolk’ I though at first, but I guess ‘label’ is already an English word.

I’ve also started using Dopplr a while ago. Dopplr is this service with which burglars can see if you’re at home or abroad and can then safely break into your house to steal anything but your laptop (because you’ll have that with you I would say). It’s still nice though to be able to see where some of your friends are heading in near future.