About

My name is Erwin van der Valk. Welcome to my blog. I’m a… person with to many interests and too little time. But as that doesn’t really help, i’ll try to give a bit of an outline of who I am.

I’m a husband and father of two wonderful childeren and servant of 4 cats.

Professionally, i’ve been coding for most of my life, starting even as a child. As a software engineer / architect, I’m always trying to combine the things I’ve learned in the past (oh how we love to reinvent the wheel) with the latest developments (things are developing faster and faster). I’ve now been in software engineering for over 24 years.

Learning new things

I’m absolutely passionate about learning new things and improving myself. My mantra is: Try many things, fail at them, learn from your mistakes and from experienced people around you and you’ll end up with new skills.

Not afraid to try new things and fail at them the first couple of times before sometimes succeeding, i’ll ofen attemp to learn some new skills. For example, we recently had a house designed and built. During this process, I thought my self 3d modeling and 3d printing. Printing 3d mockups of your house before it’s built is a great way to see how things will work out.

Trying new things is a great way to new things about yourself as well. For example, I built my own wardrobe closets and I learned many wonderful new things. Not to build your own wardrobe closets for example.

Anyway, I’ve found this trait to be great for my professional career.

I’ve been professionally developing software since 1998 and primarily helping companies to become better at software engineering and software architecture.