Subjects

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Number One

Hi there, welcome to my weblog!

Let me first introduce myself; my name is Niels Brouwers. Born almost 31 years ago, now happily living together with my lovely girlfriend and our cat in a nice house in Waalre, a small village in the south of the Netherlands. I received my bachelor degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Fontys Hogescholen in 2001 and my masters degree in Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2006. I am currently employed by Nspyre.

My professional interests are software modeling, model driven engineering, domain specific languages, code generation and developing embedded software in general. You can click on the LinkedIn button on the right to see more detailed information about me.

So now the formalities have passed, let’s get down to business.

Why did I start blogging?

Let me try to explain why I started blogging.

The discipline of software engineering is relatively new compared to other engineering disciplines. As a result, this discipline is constantly improving to create software that is of higher quality, more affordable, maintainable, and quicker to build. This leads to a constant rapid evolution of aspects such as paradigms, processes, methods, programming languages and tools that increasingly assist the software engineer to reach this goal. In turn, this leads to a load of choices that need to be made when developing software. Are we going to develop software using the imperative, the declarative or the object oriented programming paradigm? Is the implementation language going to be C, C++, Java or Python? Is the project planned according to the classic waterfall or an agile development process?

As a software engineer, you are confronted with the choices mentioned in the previous paragraph, likely even more. Loads of reading material in the form of books or articles on the internet can help you to study all of these aspects of software engineering in detail, but let’s face it: it is all too much. Therefore, I think it is part of being a software engineer to try to get the big picture and form your own ideas about each of the aspects and the choices that may possibly be made.

So, now we are getting close to the answer of the question: why did I start blogging? The most important reason why I started blogging was because I wanted to write down my thoughts and idea’s I have about software engineering in order to prevent thinking about them over and over again. Furthermore, if you write something down and expose it to the world you take extra caution that what you write has some truth in it. So it actually acts as some kind of safety mechanism that prevents me from having crazy idea’s ;-)

Last but not least, I hope that one of my articles will be subject to some discussion between readers and myself in order to improve the article and correspondingly my idea’s. This is where your help is appreciated!

What subjects will I be blogging about?

Don’t worry, I will try to limit the amount of blogs related to my personal life to a bare minimum (don’t want to bore the rest of the world with it ;-)). The subjects will mostly be related to my professional career as being a software engineer and (obviously!) will have something to do with my (professional) interests as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Closing words

I really hope you will enjoy reading my blog and please feel free to comment on my articles. See you back soon!

Kind regards,
Niels Brouwers.