As much of you might already know, I received the key to my new apartment on the 25th of September. I’ve just uploaded a shitload of pictures taken around my apartment to my picasa account!

In the first month of work I’ll be educated through a masterclass program in which I will learn the basics of Enterprise Information Management, which results in a training in Documentum and GX as two Content Management Systems. When this month of training is done, I will be sent to one of VLC’s customers to ‘prove my worth’. In other words: I’m excited :).

I could be mistaken though. The amount of bottles (34!) could also indicate we all buy the crap, but don’t use it that often…heheh.

PS. Personally I can account for 2 bottles.

I’m in search of a new job as a Java/J2EE Software Engineer. Might you have an interesting position and are you wondering if I’m any good: please take a look at my LinkedIn-profile.

So, am I jobless then? Of course not! From this day on, I’m a proud employee of Forest & Fields IT in Alphen aan den Rijn. I’ve been working in Alphen through Sogyo for an entire year and from now on I’m officially hired by F&F.

‘Invest regularly in your Knowledge Portfolio’

This is one of the valuable lessons learned from a book called ‘Pragmatic Programming’.

Over 1,25 years ago, I started working at Sogyo and was presented my own copy of this book. I really enjoyed reading it back then. Every now and then I still take the time to go through a chapter or two to refresh my memory and review some of the valuable lessons taught by the authors.

Pragmatic Programmer: A must-have

Going through my RSS-feeds today, one of my colleagues at Sogyo reminded me of the fact that this book, as well as many other books in these series, are very well written and -most importantly- are readable for everyone (even those who don’t have the natural drive to read through 2 books a week). That’s why I decided to order three new books, hoping I will be able to read through these in let’s say 6 months.

I ordered the following:

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning

Practices of an Agile Developer

Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit

Should be enough to read I believe, or am I missing any good books?

Arriving at Hotel Goderie in Roosendaal, we met around 25 PHP enthousiasts ready to squash some bugs. After firing up the internet connection we received a small introduction from one of the programmers at Ibuildings one of the main contributors on the Zend Framework: Jurien. He told us what would be the correct way to find and fix a bug in the Zend Framework.

Since I’m officially a Java programmer, I found it a bit exciting to attend this meeting. My knowledge of PHP has not been improved for over a year, and the Zend Framework was a bit new for me. Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed myself and actually fixed a small bug in the Audioscrobbler features of the Zend Framework. Since the internet connection in the Hotel was not working later in the afternoon, I wasn’t able to actually check my fix in to the svn repository. I’ve still not managed to do so, but it’s on my todo-list :).

I think this bughuntday-thing is a great initiative; it brings together a small group of programmers and is a great way to involve new people into open source. I’ve never actually been very active in the open source community, although I’ve been using open source for quite some years now. I’ve never even reported a bug, so me actually fixing one in an open source product is quite encouraging. It is great to see there are a great number of people out there willing to fix bugs on open source products. This inspires me.

The exact number of fixed bugs on the bughuntday is not yet determined, but I’m sure we did some good. I’ve learned quite a lot about unit testing, so it was useful for me anyhow :). And above all: we all received an elePHPant, whoohoo!

Some pics of the event can be found here.

@Mattijs: thanks for fixing my wireless connection on my laptop, I can finally blog from bed (without using a rather inconvenient cable).

I am:

1. not achieving to regularly write a blogpost
2. about to get back into my old habit of playing tennis (this one’s not that bad)
3. developing a new habit of visiting my soon to be new home every week
4. ordering a pizza each freaking monday
5. getting back into my old habit of repeating the fact I’m falling back into old habits….

The weird thing about the project is that we’ve never seen our customer in real life yet. Last week I received an e-mail from our customer in which she requested to meet up. So as a result, I’m visiting Paris for this meet-up together with our projectleader on Octobre 1st. Yay