Professional interests

Throughout the years I have dealt with a lot of different aspects of programming and system development and spend a lot of time digging down into a lot areas to understand them thoroughly. This knowledge, which supplied with a deep understanding of what is possible, is now used more and in larger extent to design software.

This is why I believe I am very suitable for designing software – to have the role as software architect. It is important to understand that my interests here mainly lies in the "engine" area of the software. My skills in user interface design are somewhat limited.

A software architect draws the big picture in the software, describes how the different components – in any differing size – works together. The details of the implementation of the different components are then discussed with the developers who typically have the full understanding of the problem areas in that specific component. The coding done by a software architect is more or less limited to "proof of concept"-coding – explorative coding – to create code that tries out an idea – explorative development.

Among my secondary interests you find the processes and in particular the tools used in a development department. Such a department has a big need for tools that make programming easy and helps the developers catching bugs, errors and mistakes as early as possible in the process. To make a development department purr like a kitten you furthermore need tools suchs as bug tracking, estimation, task control, version control, automatic build systems, automatic tests and unit tests. I am a – non fanatic – believer in TDD (Test Driven Development) and various agile methods. All these tools contribute to the reduction of errors in the product that is delivered to the customer. This, of course, gives a more satisfied customer, fewer bug reports with following bug fixes, a less overworked support department and – not least – happy developers. And we all know that a happy developer is a productive developer!

I would feel very much at home in an environment, which possibly does not have enough tasks for a full time software architect, which leaves the rest of my time to implementing and teaching the use of the above mentioned tools.