Bio

Personal

My name is Johan Mulder, born in July 1978, married to my wife Carla and father of 3 sons (age 9, 7 and 3).

I have several hobbies, such as:

  • Coding
  • Walking
  • Tinkering
  • Cycling

Professional

LinkedIn profile

As every self respecting professional, I’ve got a LinkedIn profile as well. It’s not very up to date at the moment of writing. You can find it here.

Education

From 1995 to 1999 I went to a school named Friese Poort. From 2011 to 2014 I followed evening classes at Hanzehogeschool Groningen to get an engineering degree in software engineering. That was quite a struggle (not in difficulty, but very time consuming) and although it hasn’t even been a year it feels like I followed those classes ages ago. It does feel good to finally have a degree of some value 😉

History

I’ve been working in IT for all of my professional life and before, specifically at companies related to internet services. Before my working career, I was tinkering with Linux systems. I started with a 6 CD box of Linux distroes in 1996. Things weren’t documented very well back then, so it’s taken a lot of time to figure stuff out. Those were the days! 

Even before then, I was busy tinkering with systems. Mostly DOS and Windows 95 (blugh). Besides that, I was into programming too. Pascal was my first language, but the programming environment I had at the time wasn’t very convenient. At some computer market I ran into Microsoft QuickPascal and with that I started my programming career.

Later on, I started using other programming languages as well. C and (mostly) Perl were languages I’ve used a lot between 1999 and 2005. My C knowledge has become quite rusty and I’m not touching Perl anymore either. When I joined Cambrium in 2004, I started using PHP. Since then I’ve coded a lot of PHP stuff. Enough to have a strong opinion about it. I’ve seen PHP 3 to current version 7.2. Over the years I’ve also coded in Python, C++, Javascript, C# (minimally), TypeScript and Java. Of all these languages I have special feelings for Java.

You may be surprised that I like Java. Obviously Java and everything surrounding the Java environment (the libraries, Java EE) may have its quirks, but I just like it. It beats PHP, and programming in it instead of PHP just feels like a breeze.
What I like about Java is that there’s a huge amount of information available. Also, lots of libraries are available so reinventing the wheel is hardly ever necessary. Of course not all libraries have very high quality, and before using any open source libraries, I take a decent amount of time to research it and check if it meets my own quality standards.
Besides that, I just like statically typed languages better than dynamically typed languages. I like be constrained to types, because it makes it so much harder to make mistakes in passing around stuff in method calls. Too much detail for this page, so I’m just going to leave it for now.

Current job

I’m doing lots of things on my current job. Cambrium is a company offering internet access for the business and consumer market as well as Usenet access. I’m the jack of all trades, doing network design and maintenance, design and development of various types of software (billing, network administration, internet connection provisioning, fiber connection registration) and system administration.

Obviously I like the software design and development part best. It’s far more satisfactory than network and system administration. As coding is my hobby too, my job is just an extension of it 😉

Freelancing

Besides my job at Cambrium, I’m also a freelancer. I provide my programming services to a small selection of companies.