The person behind all of this...

I was born on March 6th, 1978, in a hospital in Gouda. It didn't take too long before we moved to the northern areas of the Netherlands, in a province called Friesland. There, I grew up on the countryside. I became deaf at the age of 2 due to an infection called meningitis. I learned how to swim in Stiens, went to the local tennis club to play tennis for a few years, and after playing soccer on the streets for a long time with my friends, I decided to join the local soccer club. After a while I lost interest in team sports, even though it was great fun to spend time with team mates. It was the competition pressure that I didn't like in the soccer team, so I quit it. Soon afterwards I joined a jujutsu club in Leeuwarden because I got interested in Japanese martial arts. Jujutsu seemed very effective to me both in defense and offense. After I moved to Rotterdam for study purposes, I joined the ninjutsu club in the area. It was fantastic to learn such a great art with a lot of discipline. I enjoyed the trainings and the outdoor trainings, and the special international training sessions, mostly in Dublin. Unfortunately, as I became more and more occupied with other things, I decided to quit ninjutsu.

As for education, I went to the H.D. Guyot school for deaf in Groningen at first. At the same time I also attended a mainstream school in the village for 1 day a week. This way, I have tasted both sides of the greeny grass. Upon entering secondary education, the school for deaf in Groningen could not suffice in my educational needs, so we looked for a mainstream school where I could learn at a better pace. Graduated after six years of secondary education with scientific subjects and some classical subjects, I entered the Utrecht University to major in Computational Science, an area that got my interest because it has all the scientific subjects I was interested in bundled into one course: mathematics, physics and computer science. Unfortunately, I did not like the atmosphere at the University, and was not motivated enough to go there. So after 2 years of Utrecht, I changed to the Rotterdam University of Profession to study Computer Science. That went better, but still, after a few years, I completely lost interest in the study because it did not add anything to my knowledge. After a few boring, unmotivated years, I found a job as a programmer for e-commerce solutions, and decided to quit my studies. But since that would've been a major waste, I got called by my teacher, and after the meeting it was decided that I could finish my studies using my new job as the source for my bachelor's thesis, which was great. But it still took a while before I was really finished with that, and after 2 years I handed in my thesis, did my presentation, and got graduated. So this means I am currently a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science...

As for my job, I am a lead developer of an e-commerce solution developed by a small company in Rotterdam. It is cool to work on a big project like this, and to apply new technologies to such a rolling project without losing its main functionality. We are working with PHP5, using the OOP capabilities, MySQL5 for the data storage, and Smarty for the templating. For the user experience we also use the Ajax technology, and for data exchange we work with different formats like CSV and XML, and also SOAP, to exchange data with different stand-alone applications. To make the package usable in different languages, we use UTF8.

In the near future I hope to move to Japan to try new experiences there. I have been interested in Japan and the Japanese language for a fairly long time now. After having been there two times, I am certain I want to try and live there for at least one year. If, after one year, I am still confident about Japan, I might stay there for longer.

Bloog is a project by W.K.J. Thielen