A little bit on who we are and what we do.

Jan started his career in logistics before moving into computer science and project management. After receiving his BSc of Science from Oldenburg University (http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/en/) he worked for a R&D consultancy (http://www.offis.de/) as a consultant and project manager. This is where he got interested in agile principles. He moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2007 where he worked as a project manager and Scrum Master at House of Travel (http://www.hot.co.nz) - and later as acting solution architect and Java Application Development Manager. He has fostered the introduction of agile principles into the organisation and lead the first full time Scrum team at HOT. Jan's interests include software engineering best practices & principles, XP, coding in Java, team building, the problems around self organisation and acceptance of responsibility, and ways to scale Scrum (e.g. Scrum of Scrums).

Java (formerly known as Oak) is my 'favourite' language. I took a couple of turns in my career, so it took till 2001 that I got started at University and immediately realised that I did like to write code. By the end of the second term I was of the ground and away. That was in 2001 and since then things have changed in the Java world (and in mine) and - amongst many other things - I have moved from the Netbeans to the Eclipse camp along the way ;).

What fascinated me from the start where the possibilities (and limitations) of Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs) and so that has been one focus of my development world. I also found the possibilities of Open Source Software and free software quite frankly fantastic. Both RIA and OSS to me have a strong anchor in the Java world.