The Waysis group gave birth to yet another product called XPark. This started from an attempt to use Brickyard's enforcement platform for access control (despite warnings from the development team not to do so). Eventually, my team was able to fulfill that promise by creating new services that together became XPark. With this new product, Brickyard started serving B2B customers next to B2G. The owners concluded that XPark asa a B2B platform effectively was a business unrelated to Brickyard, which is a B2G platform. They made XPark a new company within Waysis. I felt it to be my fatherly duty to oversee XPark's continued development after the split from Brickyard. I was the only one within development who had been there for the entire journey, Same as with previous internal job switches, my work didn't change that much. My job title did change, to "head of development". Once again, I had to forge a new development team, and so I did. Again, my mandate as a tech leader within Waysis solidified more.

In 2017, BPE found a niche in which it was far ahead of its competition: ANPR camera based enforcement. To mark the more focused direction of the company, it changed name to Brickyard. My role did not change as drastic as my new snazzy job title within it implied: I was still heading the software development team like I was before this change. However, I do feel I had a better mandate within the rebranded organization. I led a team of 7 people in the end. In this period, we moved from working with developers working on consultancy basis in favor of hiring more in-house developers. I worked with the tech lead to start breaking up the monolith that had been established by our predecessors. Together, we moved to a service architecture, started advocating devops practices to make rollouts more predictable, helped establish serious QA practices, and introduced the use of services to the cloud. We were able to finally phase out the last remnants of legacy that we inherited from Simac.

BP Enforcement made software to support the on-street enforcement of parking and traffic laws and regulations. It was internationally active in Sweden, Australia, Belgium, and Spain.Within this organization, I was responsible for the intake of product requirements from our distributors and their customer. I took care of the analysis of each requirement and its transformation into a software design.

The parent company of Taxameter decided to split off software development of its Mobile Parking Payment solution in a new company named Brick Parking, which in 2014 became part of Yellowbrick International, a joint venture with Parkeon (now known as Flowbird). I cannot help but think that my decision to join Taxameter gave those decisions significant momentum.As an architect at Brick Parking, I was responsible for the design and implementation for the following projects: * Features to support business customers * Features to support white labeling and co-branding * New options for transaction price calculation in our PL/SQL based tariff engine * REST APIs for enforcement and mobile apps (one based on Spring, the other Apache CXF) * Replacement of native apps by HTML5 based hybrid apps (made with Cordova) * Replacement of the customer self-service web application based on Java 7 and Spring MVC * Preparation of the parking part of the platform for roll out in other western European countriesNext to my role as an architect, I tried to fill roles that the development team temporarily needed. As such, I also contributed as a developer, build administrator, tester, DBA, system administrator, functional administrator, and third line support. I even acted as interim development manager. I made the (business) case for defining some of these activities as full-time roles within the team, which caused the team to grow from 3 to 9 people. Finally, I helped redefine the division of responsibilities between Brick Parking and its sister companies Yellowbrick and Taxameter.

At Taxameter, I was responsible for the development and maintenance of two products: * The Yellowbrick Mobile Parking Platform * The Bollards platform (centralized access control over city centers)This involved finding my way through many applications written in a plethora of languages: Java, .NET 2.0/3.5, PHP 4, C, shell script, Mysql stored routines, PL/SQL. After finishing work on the bollards platform, I wrote an analysis in which I advised on replacing it with a completely new one. Funnily enough, the organization had expected me to issue this advice for Yellowbrick's stack, but there I found a solid foundation, albeit with a number of solvable problems.I regard the design and implementation of a new Java 6 based transaction distribution tier for Yellowbrick as my biggest achievement during that time. It solved fundamental issues of the pre-existing solution that had many resource contention problems, laid the foundation for mobile apps on Yellowbrick, and allowed the platform to grow to a transaction volume five times larger than when I joined, without significant impact on its overall performance. It lasted in production for over 10 years.

Coder/gun for hire

I was one of two developers of a new web application for monitoring credit lines. Our application ran in WebSphere 6 and was based on Spring (ORM, Web, MVC), Hibernate, and Dozer. The code was unit tested with Junit, Jmock, and MockEJB. I concentrated mostly on the design and implementation of the database, business layer, security layer, and service layer. I implemented features and use cases across all layers though.

As one of the software developers, I was responsible for building new features of the ADSL and VOIP provisioning system, which consists of a mesh of Java, .NET, Perl and PHP applications. My concern was mostly with integrating the various components of a new application using Spring Web Flow as well as updating existing Java 5 web services (which make heavy use of many parts of the Spring framework, as well as Axis 1.4 and Hibernate), with an occasional venture into Perl.

Developer/consultant

Initially, I came to MCFE to maintain Java web applications that were built using Struts and Hibernate, and to develop templates for the Jahia-based CMS that serves as the skeleton of MCFE's B2B portal sites. However, I soon found myself working on improving software development practices (most specifically regarding release management). Eventually, I also became heavily involved in maintaining the .NET and classic ASP web applications at MCFE. I advised on how to improve the portal architecture and implemented some of these changes.

The Special Products Engineering team in Amstelveen built new features on HP Openview Service Desk 4.5. These features were requested and sponsored by large Service Desk customers. As one of the technical leads for SPE, I was involved in the development process from end to end. I mostly worked in requirement analysis, design and prototyping of new features, although I have done my fair share of Java coding. For example, I was lead developer of the dynamic forms feature introduced in Service Pack 18 of HP Openview Service Desk 4.5. In most projects, I led 1 or 2 other developers in our virtual team. Some of the members were in the same room, but others were based in Shanghai, whom I managed through frequent Skype and chat sessions.

I was one of the developers for the ADSL provisioning process. This process was implemented using Java, Spring, Hibernate, Axis, and Apache Commons.

I maintained integrations of HP OpenView Service Desk with other products from the OpenView family as well as third party products (such as Microsoft MOM). Next to that, I was a ClearCase administrator and a non-official technical writer.

Oracle DBA, AIX administrator. Because administration becomes a breeze once you got your systems and monitoring set up nicely, I had a lot of time to work on integrating plant systems using perl scripts.