Introducing the Author

Geertjan Wielenga was born in the Netherlands and moved with his family at an early age to South Africa. That was because, ironically, his father was appointed by his church as an evangelist in South Africa, just as his son was to become an evangelist, though of a very different kind, over the course of his career in the software industry.

After completing his university studies, which were focused on political science and legal studies, Geertjan left South Africa in 1996 with the intention to travel for a year before resuming his direction in the legal domain. However, he soon found that he needed financial resources to sustain his travels and found himself editing and proofreading technical software manuals in the Netherlands from May 1996 onwards. A series of technical writing stints followed, in a variety of software organizations in the Netherlands, followed by several years in the same domain in Austria and the Czech Republic.

In Prague, he worked for Sun Microsystems from 2004 until its acquisition in 2010 by Oracle. He wrote documentation for NetBeans IDE, while writing and delivering training courses on the NetBeans APIs. He traveled all over the world introducing large organizations to the benefits of building their enterprise software on top of the NetBeans Platform. With the takeover by Oracle, he became a product manager focused on the enterprise JavaScript ecosystem and increasingly specialized in Oracle JET, which is Oracle’s free and open-source JavaScript toolkit for frontend user interface development.

His enthusiasms in the software domain have concentrated themselves around the open-source ecosystem and in unlocking the resources that large vendors have for supporting education and open-source ecosystems.

Over the years, he’s also informally engaged a number of developer advocates around the world in conversations around their profession, which has led to this book, which he hopes you, the reader, will benefit from and that it will inspire new developers to broaden their perspective on interesting and fulfilling ways of working in the information technology industry.