Availability and Capacities

Foto M.D. de Jong

Availability

I am only limited available for new projects.

As I'm working on several ongoing projects at the moment I am only available for only part-time or small projects.
Because of my research I'm often available on short notice.

Capacities

An overview

A full version of my resume is available on the staff page. This is a short summary.

After obtaining my MBA with a major on information technology, I worked in Software Engineering for a couple of years. After that I started a company with my brother which we ran for six years. My brother continued with the company, which still exists. The next three years I worked as information architect and Chief Information Officer at a mid-sized IT company.

After 20 years of IT work I have been everything from sidekick to CEO. In 2005 I decided to focus myself on doing what I like the most: finding out the fundamental workings of things and writing programs.

Functions

The functions I've filled range from simple application design and implementation to dispensing strategic information management advice.
The knowledge I got in my education and my years of management experience, have made me capable of quickly finding practical implementations that comply with the demands of the customers.

The last 20 years I've often been called in to help projects that had gotten stuck. In most cases I was able to quickly find a simple adaptation to get these projects going. I have enough confidence of my capabilities in this regard that I'm willing to tackle these problems on a no-cure-no-pay contract.

I have successfully led development teams of up to 5 people and am good at multitasking. Most of the work I did in the past was on office and back office automation projects, but over the last 10 years the building of websites has gradually become the main focus of my work.

Technical know-how

The last six years I used ASP, Java, JavaScript, .NET, Perl, PHP, SQL, Visual Basic for Applications, XSLT and the Zend Framework intensively. I have acquainted myself with Ruby and XQuery, but I haven't used them in a commercial project yet.

As for Markup languages I have mastered CSS, DTD's, HTML/XHTML, LaTeX, SOAP, Schema, XML and XSL-FO. Furthermore I have got multiple years of working experience with each of these databases management systems: DB/2, MS-Access, MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server.

Strengths

I am an expert in improving efficiency through Information Technology. I create these improvements through application designs that are easy to use and simple to maintain, but also by looking beyond IT for solutions. I know the IT side of management as well as the management side of IT. My IT skills are up-to-date and run deep and I like to share my knowledge and explain things.

As a result I can be employed as consultant, programmer, analyst, project manager and educator. My social skills are what you might expect from a consultant.

Weaknesses

Though I regularly design easy to use web applications, they will never win any design prices if only because I am colorblind. Thankfully I do have experience in implementing other peoples designs.

In all the years of my working life I' had little experience with standardized project management methods, such as Prince II. The only reason is a lack of demand for these skills.
My own preferences go to RAD techniques like Extreme Programming.