Michel Schildmeijer was born in the Netherlands, in 1966. He has lived his whole life in the capital, Amsterdam. After mid-school, he started studying pharmacy. After four years, he had to fulfill his military service, in the Royal Dutch Air Force, working in a pharmacy.
After this, he got a job as a quality inspector for a pharmacy company, but after about two years he switched his job for a position in a hospital's pharmacy, where he worked for over 10 years.
In the meantime he got married, and he and his wife Tamara had two boys, Marciano and Robin. He went through a difficult period in his personal life, when his wife got extremely ill for some time and he had to take all the responsibility for managing his family. Fortunately, he got intensive support from his parents-in-law, who helped greatly with taking care of his kids.
Within his pharmacy job, around 1994, he became acquainted with the Medical Information System which was being used to structure patients' medical history and information. This was a system running on HP UNIX, a MUMPS SQL database and text-based terminal. He started learning UNIX and MUMPS to give operational support. By then he became enthusiastic, so he switched jobs and started working for some IT companies. Around 2000 he started using Oracle on a big banking application for settlements and clearance. The system was running on Oracle 7, AIX UNIX, BEA WebLogic, and BEA Tuxedo. This was the first time he worked with WebLogic. From then he became more and more specialized in middleware and Oracle. He worked on many projects. Around 2006 he started working on several projects for IBM, in the Oracle Middleware team, administering, configuring, and tweaking large Oracle Middleware systems with Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Portal, Oracle HTTP, and many more.
In 2008, he worked for Randstad Holding, and got more and more specialized in developing the middleware infrastructure around applications. He started an investigation into migrating the Oracle Application Server 10g and SOA Suite 10g to the 11g platform. Around that period Oracle acquired BEA.
From working in Brussels for Belgacom, a big Telco company, he started his current job as Oracle Fusion Middleware Architect, for AMIS, an IT company specialized in Oracle and JAVA.
His focus was always on developing the infrastructure for many companies, and advising them how to migrate or build a new middleware platform based on the latest 11g techniques. He also became an instructor, teaching all the basics of Oracle WebLogic 11g, just as in this book, but from a practical point of view.
The reason for his writing this book is because he thinks that middleware infrastructure and administration have become an important part in the application landscape, even though the focus in a migration project of an application is always on application logic and functionality, and less on the pre-conditions of how this application will be distributed to end-clients or other systems.