About

I am the Founder of We Wire People, although this is my individual / personal site.
After almost 15 years of working for Global 100 customers for my employer, I decided to follow my heart and passion and do what I do best: connect people through technology in the broadest sense of the word. Across departments, companies, industries, entire countries or even continents, my company can and will make it happen. We really love working in the field of Integration

On this blog I share my ideas and opinions, welcoming comments and reactions: I believe in exchanging ideas and information and mutual enthusiasm in order to create new or better ways. It happens quite often that tweets lead to posts here, which receive comments, that lead to other comments, post, or tweets, etcetera. The Circle of Inspiration is what I call it

Here's some history on my educations, my work, and my spiritual journey: that last bit is a big part of my life

My educations

30 years ago I programmed my first game, in BASIC. Three fixed canons on the ground and one plane in the air flying right-to-left through the screen - those same 30 years ago, it was pretty exciting to play too, and a real adventure to program it

I went to what in England they call Grammar school, learned Latin and Greek, and most importantly the culture and books that have come along with that. Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato. Cicero, Vergilius, Seneca

At the University of Leiden, the oldest University of the Netherlands, founded in 1575 by William of Orange, I studied Languages and Cultures of Latin-America, and got my Masters of Art degree

My work

After University, I joined Capgemini. Initially started out as a COBOL programmer, I happened to be the only one around not scared to blackbox-redesign and -rebuild a system handling all EDIFACT traffic of a large national company - from scratch. So I did, had great success, and received my first bonus - it was the first of a series of tough-tougher-toughest integration projects that would seemingly last forever

Most of the years I spent as an Enterprise Integration Architect advising big multinationals and Global 100 companies on their internal and external Business Application Integration strategies and implementations. Especially the implementations as I find out that on a conceptual level everything's always looking smooth, but the devil's in the details

In 2010 I became independent, in order to completely focus on Integration. Cloud, Social Media, wirearchy: everything and everyone is getting increasingly connected and I want to help where I can most and best

I really, really love the work. The Art of Integration, as I call it, requires many skills and attentions as it ranges from business via information systems and applications to machines and networks: and everywhere, there's people in between.
Internal people, external people, third party people: unifying them all is a challenging but rewarding job, and the resulting seamless machine integration is what makes me proud and happy. It is a really, really exciting area of work that is only growing and growing, especially now Cloud and Social Media are pulling and pushing on the outside of every company

My goal? To unify this entire world. How? By showing that adapting to ever-changing rhythms can be achieved easily in IT. Standards? Forget about them: you have to adapt, adopt is not in the 21st century dictionary - well maybe only fractionary

Personal: my spiritual journey

In 2005 we (my wife, our two daughters and I) bought ourselves a bigger house, and I spent half a year redoing it next to my day job. That meant giving up on everything else and working 16 hours a day and 20-30 in the weekend. It was really, really hard work and required an enormous amount of single-minded focus. Ambitions simply far outweighed our financial reserves, and with 2 kids and 2 dogs this was an all-or-nothing / now-or-never

We made the deadline, although we first only had a toilet upstairs and had to do the dishes in the bath tub for a week - there's always a trade-off

After that, I was ready for some mental action again. And it was time to engage with the then me. Way beyond time. So I engaged, the Universe conspired to give me what I was looking for, and I made the world stand still.
My four main cornerstones:

Stephen Wolinsky
Gospel of Thomas
Epictetus' Enchiridion
Don Miguel Ruiz

And this is what I learned from them