After Toms intro, I can't stay behind. I've been working in IT for about 10 years now, mainly working as a consultant for various shops, both large and small. Other random facts: I have a degree in Astronomy, a Norwegian forest cat, 2 daughters, I live somewhere between National Park "Utrechtse Heuvelrug" and de Veluwe and sometimes strike people as hyperactive (which I'm not).

My professional background started with developing line-of-business apps with MS Access. In that first year of my career I learned a lot about what problems businesses and business users run into, and the great part of using MS Access was that most projects had limited scope but surprising functional coverage: data modelling and entry, reporting, ETL, etc.

It also planted a seed for the urge to constantly improve as many things as possible about the "developer experience", for lack of a better term. By this I mean everything that influences the quality of code written and the efficiency of writing it: tools, guidelines, frameworks, even the keyboards in use

After this flirting with arguably one of the best RAD tools out there (yes, still talking about MS Access), I got involved on the Microsoft web stack, meaning classic ASP, VB 5/6, COM+, Windows DNA, that whole can of worms. Again, working with these tools, I always tried to come up with ways to reduce the pain and strain of developing software (and we had a lot of that in those days). This was also the time I realized that no, I wasn't that elusive consultant that can do everything perfectly: sure, I can design a user interface, but I'm no user experience expert. Fine, I know something about firewalls, protocols and tunneling, but I'm by no means an infrastructure guy. To cut a long story short: I learned to focus, to concentrate on specific skills to get ahead. I dabbled a bit in DBA roles, but at the heart I am a software developer with a slight tendency for web technologies.

Luckily for all of us, the world moved on since Windows DNA, and .NET has been upon us for quite some time. To accompany this framework, Microsoft has rolled out an impressive stack of server products to support all sorts of scenario's: stuff like BizTalk, SharePoint and SQL Server with all its BI bells and whistles to name a few. These days I often work as a solution  architect, which means I have to know a bit about most of these products, but again, they are mostly outside my focus zone. I continue to focus on the developer experience, trying to share both knowledge and enthusiasm along the way. Design patterns, principles like SOLID and DRY are high on my list of intended topics, but I also expect some less-focused (but equally interesting) ramblings on things I run across.

Both Tom and I were individually toying with the idea to start a blog about programming in the .NET space in general and all things related to patterns, SOLID and effective coding strategies. After finding out we shared initials - both T.J., even though Tom's are actually T.J.T.J. - and shared ideas, combining this with the fact that I already owned this sitename, we decided to join forces and start a shared blog. Our individual introductions will cover What we intend to blog about, but I suppose this will evolve over time anyway.

The blog runs on dasBlog, with a custom theme based on the included "project84grass" theme.

For those of you that don't know me already, I live in Amsterdam near the city market the Dappermarkt and the zoo Artis. I started my career in software development as a SQL programmer at one of those companies where you were allowed to wear short pants and play squash at Squashcity in between doing some actual work.

Besides being able to play squash a lot, the level of the people working there was quite high. Working with them got me addicted to having a creative, elegant solution rather than to have something working but was ugly as hell.

Obviously this also meant spending a great deal of time figuring out why stuff works the way it does. Programming SQL can be fun but has it's limits. Luckily the shop also had quite a large .Net development team and it didn't take me long to make the move to c#. From day 1 I have been in love with Visual Studio and c#. I really, really enjoy programming a lot, even more these days thanks to Resharper and the 3.5 framework.

Nowadays I work for a large global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth (shameless copy from the US site). My work focuses around building Brownfield solutions that involve either SharePoint or Web forms (follow the money).

I have a great passion for anything that will improve the process of building quality software. This means constant reading, follow many blogs and share knowledge. Thus far I have been doing this in the teams I worked with but I look forward to share my points of view using this blog.

I will spent most of my time blogging about code, testability, SOLID and anything else that will come on my way.