About
As a solution architect I design solutions within a broad application landscape and lead my development team. In my spare hours I bake sweet and savory treats, read books and play games until it is way past a sensible hour to go to sleep.Before taking on the roles and responsibilities of a solution architect, I spent a great amount of time writing code, mainly C# and Java, as a software developer. I’ve been in the industry for over 15 years now. I like to think that I’ve seen a thing or two during this period and I try to use that knowledge to educate and guide colleagues.To unwind from a stressful day I like to go on virtual adventures and explorations of huge, sprawling, open worlds. However, there are times where I trade the freedom of these amazing landscapes for the restriction of a sim-racing rig and head on to the race track where I drive the fastest cars on the planet.On occasion I manage to unplug myself enough to go out cycling in the surrounding countryside, take the time to bake delicious sweet or savory treats, settle down with a book and become immersed in fantastic worlds rich in detail and history or on rare moments I get to enjoy some tabletop games where I can build great cities or have amazing hard-fought battles!
In a nutshell
Azure Cloud
Visual Studio
Microsoft .NET Framework
Spring Framework
Formula 1
Indycar
Scuderia Ferrari
Fanatec
Cities: Skylines
Guild Wars 2
rFactor 2
Gears of War
The Witcher 3: Gwent
Carcassonne
The Realm of the Elderlings
Discworld
Creations
Most of the inspiration particles that are sleeting through the universe pass me by, but occasionally I get hit by one. On these rare moments I get inspired to follow-up on some ideas that have been laying around lazily in the back of my mind. Here you will find some of my creations that I am strangely proud of.
Project Gwent: Gears of War
I loved the Gwent minigame that was included in the Witcher 3. I loved the Gears of War universe. I decided it would be a cool thing to combine the two and design two Gwent card decks based on Gears of War.
Sharpwright's Bakery
A couple of years ago, I discovered that I really enjoy baking any kinds of sweet and savory goodies. Some of the results are shown off in Sharpwright's Bakery.
The Coalition deck is based on the playstyle of the Witcher 3's Northern Realms. Having the concept of tight bond seemed very fitting for the Coalition squads who are fighting at the warfronts and having spies gives a counter against being overwhelmed by the monster's swarm ability.
Coalition Abilities
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Charge | Doubles the strength of all unit cards on this card's row, unless there is another charge card affecting this row. |
| Morale Boost | Adds +1 to all units on the row (excluding itself) |
| Revive | Look through your discard pile and choose 1 unit card (no heroes or special cards) and play it instantly. |
| Spy | Place on your opponent's battlefield (counts towards your opponent's total) and draw 2 cards from your deck. |
| Tight Bond | Place next to a card with the same name to double the strength of both cards. |
Leader Abilities (Chairman Prescot)
Destroy opponent's strongest monster units if the strength of that row is 10 or higher.
Destroy opponent's strongest ranged units if the strength of that row is 10 or higher.
Doubles the strength of all mechanical units.
Unit cards
| Name | Range | Strength | Ability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Fenix | Close | 4 | Spy |
| Alex Brand | Ranged | 3 | - |
| Alicia Valera | Close | 4 | - |
| Anya Stroud | Close | 7 | Hero, Revive |
| Armadillo | Heavy | 5 | Revive |
| Augustus Cole | Ranged | 10 | Hero, Morale Boost |
| Bernie Mataki | Ranged | 4 | - |
| Clayton Carmine | Ranged | 6 | - |
| Carmine Brothers (x3) | Close | 4 | Tight Bond |
| Centaur | Heavy | 6 | - |
| Damon Baird | Ranged | 10 | Hero |
| Delta-One (x3) | Ranged | 5 | Tight Bond |
| Dizzy Wallin | Close | 2 | Hero, Charge |
| Dominic Santiago | Close | 15 | Hero |
| Hammer of Dawn | Heavy | 7 | - |
| JACK | Heavy | 1 | Spy |
| JD | Ranged | 5 | - |
| Kait | Ranged | 5 | - |
| King Raven | Heavy | 5 | Revive |
| Marcus Fenix | Ranged | 15 | Hero |
| Michael Barrick | Close | 2 | Morale Boost |
| Silverback (x2) | Heavy | 8 | Tight Bond |
| Sofia Hendrik | Close | 5 | Spy |
| Sonic Resonator | Heavy | 10 | - |
| Tai Kaliso | Close | 3 | - |
| Victor Hoffman | Close | 6 | - |
The Coalition
Deck design
All of the coalition cards can be seen in the embedded album below. If you're interested in looking at the high quality images, they can be found in this Imgur post.
The Locust Horde
Deck design
All of the locust horde cards can be seen in the embedded album below. If you're interested in looking at the high quality images, they can be found in this Imgur post.
The Locust deck is based on the playstyle of the Witcher 3's Monsters. It seemed like the logical choice, Locusts never come alone and as a Gear you are always fighting overwhelming forces.
Locust Abilities
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Charge | Doubles the strength of all unit cards on this card's row, unless there is another charge card affecting this row. |
| Morale Boost | Adds +1 to all units on the row (excluding itself) |
| Revive | Look through your discard pile and choose 1 unit card (no heroes or special cards) and play it instantly. |
| Scorch | Affects this card's row on the opponent's side of the battlefield. If the opponent has a total strength of 10 or higher on that row, kill that row's strongest card(s). |
| Swarm | Go through your deck, find any cards with the same name as this card and play them all immediately. |
Leader Abilities (Queen Myrrah)
Restore a card from your discard pile to your hand.
Discard 2 cards and draw 1 card of your choice from your deck.
Doubles the strength of all ranged units.
Unit cards
| Name | Range | Strength | Ability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beast Rider | Ranged | 2 | Hero, Charge |
| Berserker | Close | 7 | Scorch |
| Boomer (x4) | Close | 4 | Swarm |
| Brumak | Heavy | 8 | - |
| Corpser | Heavy | 6 | - |
| Drone (x5) | Ranged | 4 | Swarm |
| General Karn | Heavy | 15 | Hero |
| General RAAM | Ranged | 7 | Hero, Morale Boost |
| Grenadier | Ranged | 4 | - |
| Grinder | Ranged | 5 | Scorch |
| Lambent Berserker | Close | 15 | Hero |
| Lambent (x3: Drone, Drudge, Gunker) | Ranged | 6 | Swarm |
| Lambent Leviathan | Heavy | 8 | Hero |
| Lambent Wretch | Close | 3 | - |
| Leviathan | Heavy | 5 | - |
| Palace Guard | Ranged | 5 | Morale Boost |
| Pouncer | Heavy | 4 | - |
| Reaver | Heavy | 5 | - |
| Skorch | Close | 15 | Hero |
| Tempest | Heavy | 6 | Hero, Revive |
| Ticker | Close | 3 | - |
| Wretch (x3) | Close | 2 | Swam |
Sharpwright's Bakery
Tiramisu
I love Tiramisu, but I had never made one myself, thinking it was too difficult. After I saw this video by Joshua Weissman, I was a little surprised how easy he made it look.The result was absolutely delicious, although there is still room for improvement to perfect it the next time I make it. I also cheated a little bit by using these premade ladyfinger biscuits.
Mozzarella Garlic Bread
I'm not really sure where we got the recipe for this mozzarella garlic bread from originally, but it's one of our favorites! The dough for this bread was made with the slap and fold technique, making it a deliciously, soft bread. It is topped with dried mozzarella and a garlic butter with chopped green onions.Having baked it in a cake pan, it had pan pizza vibes to it. It looked amazing and tasted even better. One of the best versions of this bread that we've ever made!
Banana chocolate oats cake
The video with the recipe for this appeared on my YouTube homepage. It looked pretty good and as an additional little bonus, it contains no additional sugars or flour.At first I was a little disappointed with the result. For me personally, it lacked the sweetness or punchy chocolate flavor to make a nice after dinner dessert. I tried a few things, such as powder sugar and a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a dollop of whipped cream, but I still wasn't convinced.Then a thought occurred to me: it's made of banana, eggs, oats, milk and nuts... all of them potential breakfast ingredients... And it worked! I enjoyed it far more as a breakfast, than I did as a dessert. From that perspective, it's might be a keeper recipe!
Spiced Root Cake
The official Skyrim cookbook is filled with delicious dishes that have been inspired by the video game. I have a few of these kinds of cookbooks and are the perfect opportunity for me to mix my gamer and baker personas!As you can see, icing cakes is not one of my strong points, but it didn't diminish the taste in the slightest!
Experience
2020 - Current day: Solution Architect
As a software architect I engage with (potential) customers to determine their needs and requirements so that I can create an on-premise or cloud solution using the appropriate technology stack and I can manage my development team to ensure that all software is built according to the vision of the proposed solution.
2010 - 2020: Senior Software Engineer
As a senior software engineer I was the technical conscience of a Scrum team and took great pride in developing maintainable and testable software according to the solution proposed by the Software Architect using the .NET and Spring frameworks so that I always delivered software in a timely manner that met my own high demands of quality and share my knowledge with the rest of the team members.
2005 - 2010: Software Engineer
As a software engineer I was part of a project team and developed software using the Microsoft stack and learned how to write high quality, maintainable code under the guidance of more experienced developers so that I could take pride in my work and grow my engineering skill-set.
2003 - 2005: Traineeship
As a trainee I started to get to grips with software development under the guidance of a dedicated mentor, learning various new programming languages along the way so that I would be prepared for a job as a Software Engineer and gain valuable insights in the day-to-day operations of a business and working in a project-based manner.
2000 - 2005: Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology
As a student I chose to follow the education for Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology so that I could fulfill my dream of becoming a game developer.2005: Graduated as Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology
2004-2005: Part-time traineeships which involved working as a trainee within a company 4 days a week while I went to college 1 day a week to finish my graduation.
Motivation
As an engineer I have always taken pride in delivering high quality software by writing clean, maintainable and testable code. As an architect I still abide by those same principles and try to instill those same values in the developers who are members of my development teams. I am at my happiest when I see my customers are satisfied with the solutions my team and I create and are equally as enthused about the end result and the underlying technologies.
Skills
Designing Azure cloud based architectures
Designing event-driven architectures
Designing microservice architectures
Agile software development methods such as Scrum and Kanban
Writing user stories and acceptance criteria for the development team
Object oriented programming using design patterns (C#, Java)
Developing dockerized applications (C#, Java)
Developing applications with Java Spring framework
Developing applications Microsoft .NET framework using C#
Developing and consuming SOAP and RESTful services
Continuous integration and deployment best practices
Languages
Dutch (fluent, native speaker)
English (fluent)
Contact
What's on your mind?
Feel free to contact me with anything. It could be an interesting story, feedback about the website or purely business. Regardless of what you have to say, as long as it is constructive and polite, I'll take the time to read and respond to it.
THANK YOU
You've done well to let me know what's on your mind! I will read your message with interest and I will try to get back to you as soon as I am able!
