About Me
I am born in 1973 and live in Tilburg, the Netherlands, with my three gorgeous children. I am also known as mrhaki, which is simply the initials of his name prepended by mr. The following Groovy snippets shows how the alias comes together:
(How cool is Groovy that we can express this in a simple code sample ;-) )
I studied Information Systems and Management at the Tilburg University. After finishing my studies I started to work at a company which specialized in knowledge-based software. There I started writing my first Java software (yes, an applet!) in 1996. Over the years my focus switched from applets, to servlets, to Java Enterprise Edition applications, to Spring-based software.
In 2008 I wanted to have fun again when writing software. The larger projects I was working on were more about writing configuration XML files, tuning performance and less about real development. So I started to look around and noticed Groovy as a good language to learn about. I could still use existing Java code, libraries, and my Groovy classes in Java. The learning curve isnβt steep and to support my learning phase I wrote down interesting Groovy facts in my blog with the title Groovy Goodness. I post small articles with a lot of code samples to understand how to use Groovy. Since November 2011 I am also a DZone Most Valuable Blogger (MVB); DZone also posts my blog items on their site.
I have spoken at the Gr8Conf Europe and US editions about Groovy, Gradle, Grails and Asciidoctor topics. Other conferences where I talked are Greach in Madrid, Spain, JavaLand in Germany and JFall in The Netherlands.
I work for a company called JDriven in the Netherlands. JDriven focuses on technologies that simplify and improve development of enterprise applications. Employees of JDriven have years of experience with Java and related technologies and are all eager to learn about new technologies.