Big changes

The first 10 years of my career I worked as a consultant for Capgemini and Accenture. I learned a lot in that time. One of the things I learned was that I wanted something else. I wanted to do something with more impact, more responsibility and together with people that wanted to do challenging projects. Not pure to get up in your career but more because they like doing cool stuff. Therefore I left Accenture to become part of a company called JTeam. It has been over 6 years that this took place.

I started as Chief Architect at JTeam. The goal was to become a leader to the other architects and create a team together with Bram. That time I was lucky that Allard joined me. We share a lot of ideas, which makes it easier to set goals and accomplish them. I got to learn a few very good people at JTeam, to bad that some of them left, but that is life.

After a few years bigger changes took place. Leonard left for Steven and the shift to a company that needs to grow started. We took over two companies (Funk and Neteffect), we now had all disciplines of software development available. From front-end to operations. As the company grew some things had to change. I got more involved in arranging things like internships, tech events, partnerships and human resource management.

We moved into a bigger building and we had better opportunities. One of the opportunities was a search solution created by Shay Banon. Gone was Steven, together with Shay he founded Elasticsearch. We got acquired by Trifork. In this change we lost most of our search expertise because all of our search people joined the elasticsearch initiative. Someone had to pick up search at Trifork and that was me together with Bram.

For over 2 years I invested a lot of time in learning about mainly elasticsearch. I created a number of workshops/trainings and got involved with multiple customers that needed search. I have given trainings to a number of customers to groups varying between 2 and 15 people. In general they were all really pleased with the trainings I have given.

Having so much focus for a while gave me a lot of time to think, I did not need to think about next steps for the company, I just needed to get more knowledgeable about elasticsearch. In that time I started out on a journey to find out what I want. I talked to my management about it and thought about it myself a lot. Then, right before summer holiday I had a diner with two people I know through the Nljug, Hans and Bert. We had a very nice talk and in the end they gave me an opportunity that I really had to have some good thoughts about. It was really interesting, a challenge, not really a technical challenge, but more an experience that is hard to find. During summer holiday I convinced myself this was a very interesting direction and I took the next step.

I had a lunch meeting with my soon to be business partner Sander. After around 30 minutes it already felt good. I really feel the energy of creating something new, I feel inspired again. This is the feeling I have been missing for a while. In September we were told that Bram was leaving Trifork. Since he is the person that got me into JTeam back in the days it felt weird. I understand his reasons to go out and try to start something new. Bram leaving resulted in a vacancy for a CTO and the management team had decided to approach Allard for this role. This was a surprise to me, but a very nice opportunity for Allard and I know he i going to do a good job. At the end of September Sander and myself presented the draft business plan to the board for Luminis. That afternoon hands were shaken. It was than that I made the last call and decided to resign from my Job at Trifork and take this new opportunity at Luminis.

I feel sad about leaving some people behind. I am going to mis the morning talks in the car with Allard about everything related to the company, I am going to mis doing projects with Roberto (We are a hell of team), I am going to mis Byron for his capabilities (You make me feel proud that I guided your first steps within Trifork), I am going to mis chasing customers with Henk (We did a good job the passed year) and I am going to mis Daphne and the after lunch walks . To all of you and all the others at Trifork, it is a small world …

Together with Sander, and with the help of all the others at Luminis, we are going to start Luminis Amsterdam. This is going to be a challenge for me, but together with Sander I feel we are going to make it happen. I feel confident that the big changes to come will be good changes.