Guus Bosman

It's about three months ago now that I left my previous company, Chess-iT in Haarlem, the Netherlands. I've had a very nice time there, so it was sad to say goodbye, even though a great adventure was awaiting me.

On one of my last days at Chess there was a small meeting to say goodbye to me and Serge, a colleague who was also leaving Chess per November 1st. We both received nice presents, and there were speeches with kind words.

Chess gave me a great book by Martin Kers with beautiful photographs of Haarlem. I also got a set with coffee, chocolate and a small coffee machine. I brought both the book and the coffee machine to the U.S.

Chess recently put a job advertisement on Monsterboard.nl; they are looking for a software engineer. If you're in that business, know J2EE and live around Haarlem, be sure to check it out.

Tomorrow morning I'll give a presentation on a project I've been working on for a potential customer.

Today I prepared a notebook with the latest version of the software and test-data, to make sure that everything will work fine tomorrow. It's nice to be busy doing something while waiting.

The weather is great today, and we're working with all the windows open. I'm wearing my shorts, which is a lot better than the warm clothes I was wearing yesterday.

It's a lot less busy now; the shop is still running well and I am working on some Chess proposals today.

Yesterday I went out for a drink with my colleagues after work; I was home around 20:00 o'clock. I felt pretty tired after a week of hard work. But also very satisfied: the project I've been working on the last three weeks is a great success!

In a period of three weeks we have created an online shop where customers can buy a variety of products. For the actual content delivery we implemented interfaces with eight external suppliers, which was a challenging task because of the short time-to-market.

But it worked, and the shop is running nice and smooth. It's very exciting to see how many visitors we have (from a mailing sent to many potential customers), and how well the shop handles the large amount of consumers. Quite a difference with my own tiny website ;)

I really enjoyed this project: I like to work in dynamic and high-pressure projects like this one. It was also great fun taking the fundamental technological decisions of the project and interacting with the customer so frequently.

A day of hard work today, and things went well. The project is ready; there are only a few small things to be done tomorrow, and the next project presented itself already.

I often listen to music while working. In the morning I start with soft, mellow music. There are a couple of RealAudio internet radiostations that provide a perfect non-stop stream of background music. After lunch, I often switch to a more up-beat station with dance music.

I noticed that it depends on how I feel: today it was quite busy at work. I guess there was no need for music after lunch to wake me up, and I'm still listening to the easy "morning music".

The project is getting ready. Yesterday night I ran a so-called "stress-test" on the application. I flooded it with fake-consumers all through the night, to see if the application would stay up & alive, and it did. It's a nice idea that it can survive so many visitors.

A side effect was that in the morning my mailbox had almost 20.000 e-mails, all generated by the application.

Today is Ascension Day, which is a national holiday in the Netherlands. Chess is closed today, and many colleague's are taking tomorrow of as well.

For me it was a working day today. Since a week I've been working on a new, short project that has to be ready somewhere next week. I didn't mind working today at all -- the project is very cool and it's really fun to make sure that the project will be ready on time.

It's my job to make sure that whole project take makes sense from a technological point of view, which is a nice responsibility. The website we are creating has to be secure, and we are integrating the website with around 10 external parties, which is really nice.

Today we had a Chess meeting in Zeist all day.

There was an informal get-together yesterday evening. I had to do some administrative work, so I arrived only at midnight in Zeist. The bar in the hotel had just closed, but the personel was very friendly and gave me a beer anyway.

Soon afterwards we went to a pub around the corner, De Druppel. That pub closed around 2:30 o'clock, which was probably for the best as everybody had to get up at 9:00 o'clock.

It was a very interesting day; there were presentations of projects Chess did, and presentations on the business processes and quality assurance of Chess.

This afternoon I gave a presentation about my graduation project. There were about 15 colleague's.

It was very nice to tell about the things I've researched and found out, but also difficult. How to describe six months work in 45 minutes? I think it went quite well.

For those of you interested I've made the sheets of the presentation available online.

I've moved to another desk again.

It's unfortunate that I had to give up the view over the canal, but now I have a nice view on the garden at the backside of Chess.