My real name is Niels. I live in Delft, The Netherlands.

Some of my collegues and friends say I'm a a real 'Perlvert', which probably means that I write way to many Perl-scripts or is it the way I write them? Well you may be the judge of that! I like to call myself a 'Perl-hacker' and wear the 'Perl-monger' t-shirt proudly.

I got hooked to Perl while I was working for Siemens Nixdorf Informatiesystemen [SNI] in 1995. This was my first job and I was working for a big C++ Car Dealer software development project (Nedis) (my Technical Highschool graduate project included design - and implementation of a FFT analysis and postprocess application written in C++ and was running on Windows for Workgroups). After a while the management must have spotted some fine Perl hacker skills in me, because they gave me the opportunity to join the subteam which developed Perl helper tools for developing the real beast.

After some while the Nedis project got in to a redesign phase. The C++ implementation was fast but unmanageable and unstable. A descission of the uppermanagement was made to stop the deveopment of the C++ version. So I moved on within SNI to a optical scanning project which required C - and other 'hacking' skills. At that time no one had built a large application on top of the used framework software as we did in our team. This resulted again in in not a happy end...

But people by then knew I was a Perl lover. I got all kind of small jobs like "I've here a plain ASCII file of 10Mb and I need some data extracted from it. Can you help me?". Well my moto was: "The larger, the better!" (Luckily for me, no one had bigger files then 1Gb at that time...). By doing all kind of extract and convert projects, I learned to optimize Perl-code and write nice Perl regular expressions (the hardcore of Perl).

Then the Internet technology sneaked into the SNI buildings. I had used the Internet in my graduation heavily to search for information and examples on how to develop windows applications in C++ and descided to join the Internet-team. The existing Internet-team at that time built only HTML website. I started to develop all various kind of webapplications based on CGI, Perl with - or without linked databases. The websites we as a team built, were Intranet - and customer websites.

Then I got the opportunity to work as a contractor for BT in the Netherlands. They where building a PoP in Amsterdam and needed people with Internet skills. Via via they found me, and I must admit in most areas I was still a rooky. But they gave me an excellent environment to learn. After about a week I had the chance of showing other people in BT I had usefull Perl-skills. I saw a guy strugling writing a Perl-script. His implementation (3 days of coding) was terrible slow and therefore inaccurate. After 1 hour of coding I had 85% of his code and it was 10 times faster! Thats how I got known as 'Perl-hacker' within BT.

While I was still working as a contractor, SNI descided to sell my department because they stopped software development activities. At that time a job vacancy came along within BT, so I descided to join. I can say, I have no regrets about this descission so far. In January 2001 I became a full Concert employee. But as Concert wasn't a big succes, I became again BT (this time BT Global Services) again, so I'm now "fidling" with BT servers and toys :-) .

After being a sysadmin for BT for some years (and obviously writing Perl scripts in my sysadmin role) I was asked to help the a specific BT network product. They could use somebody with good (Perl) scripting skills. After doing all kinds of little upscaling and productivity enhancing little projects I was asked to build a website to detect loops on customer interface. This is how 'Chameleon' was born and became a big success and a good item to put on my resume.