A while ago a was asked by Kilian to share seven things about me. The hype of seven things is cooling down a bit, so I will not link to seven other people to share their things. I hope it if you don’t mind me showing off some personal details.

• I’ve been a lifeguard for about eight years. But unlike the images along the article at Wikipedia show, we train in a covered swimming pool since it is not that sunny in the Netherlands. Currently, I train a bunch of children to become a lifeguard. A few years ago I launched a Dutch website to promote the sport, but I haven’t updated it in a long while.
• Last year I finished my high school. I now study Artificial Intelligence at Groningen University, and I really like it so far. Since AI is a broad subject, I don’t really know what I’m going to do later. It can be robotics, but also something more close to the subject of ‘Internet’.
• I like watching movies, and don’t really follow series. Since it became more of a habit to watch several movies a week, I recently started collecting and rating them on this webpage. An actor I really like is Edward Norton. He has portrayed several characters extremely well, so it is a pity he hasn’t won an Oscar yet.
• I have a weird habit to say a word or sentence for a few weeks after I heard it or made it up. Sometimes it comes from a movie, sometimes from someone else. It is really annoying for people in my surroundings (sorry!). Problem is that it keeps going on and on with a lot of different sentences over the years.
• The Rubik’s cube is my slave. I can solve it, but not extremely fast: in about 40-45 seconds on average. Unlike most people think, it is quite easy to solve. The hardest part is solving it fast. I very recently started this list of Rubik’s cube appearances in feature movies to combine cubing and watching movies.
• Liquids I drink often are—in no particular order—coffee, beer, water, milk and Taksi Tropical Fruit. The latter is only available in the Netherlands. It is a not really a fruit juice, but it comes close.
• From time to time I like to imagine the faith of people I meet on the street or in the train (a bit like in the movie Lola Rennt). Most of the times it is a nice way to make jokes of people anonymously.

So that’s seven things. If you have questions or comments, I hope the form below does not shy you away.

I just came back from Amsterdam, where Peter-Paul, Tom and I went to a notary to formally set up the association Fronteers. Fronteers, formerly known as the Guild of Front-Enders, is the Dutch association for front-end web developers (the guys and girls that know HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

After the (quite quick) visit to the notary, we went to a nearby café to celebrate the set up and also have our first meeting. We discussed some topics, nothing really new but more to have a clear view on what’s going on. We also hope to have the website ready soon, Krijn is working on that.

For all Dutch front-end developers that have been in a winters’ sleep for the past half year, as well as for the foreign visitors, a short introduction into Fronteers. It started April this year when Peter-Paul had the idea to bring the job as front-end developer to a higher level. The job itself isn’t respected within may web development companies, programmers and designers often do ‘the HTML‘. Also, the Dutch web accessibility guidelines are there for a time now, but the government and large companies don’t know which company can help them to build a web site compliant to those guidelines.

After the first two meeting we had over fifty interested front-enders, and that number grew once we made the idea public. Pretty quick there were plans for a conference (which took place exactly three weeks ago), and also life was put into some committees for education, certification and Flash (and some more).

So that was a brief introduction into Fronteers. Next is the announcement of the web site, where new members can sign up. We guess the number of members now is about 70 people, pretty much for an idea that started just a half a year ago. If you’re interested, stay updated via our mailinglist. I see Tom wrote a nice article as well about today, at the info.nl blog.

Cheers to Fronteers :)

Yesterday the founding congress of the Guild of Front-Enders was held in Amsterdam. I was in the audience to listen to a few great speakers. After the congress the general members’ meeting was held to vote for the ideas and the board of the Guild.

The congress

Stephen Hay (Cinnamon Interactive) was the first speaker, and held a great presentation about the Web Guidelines. He noted the importance, and gave a five tips to easily follow 80 percent of the guidelines.

Also, there were some code reviews. I saw two (there were three in total), the ones of Arjen Geerse (Lost Boys) and Tom Greuter (info.nl). Both they presented how they organize the front-end within the companies they work for. In my opinion they have clear and good ways to develop internally, and for me as freelancer it was great to see a bit of how it works in larger companies.

The two panels of non-front-enders (managers and clients) were quite interesting. Unfortunately I haven’t a summary of the thoughts (if someone has: it is really good content to publish, so don’t wait!). Bobby van der Sluis (Refunk) presented his ideas on how the GvFE could be there for Flash designers and developers.

The general members’ meeting

The general members’ meeting gave some new ideas and points on how the Guild will take its next steps. The name (Guild of Front-Enders) will be compared with other, new names. Members can vote for the name they want. There will be a working group for certification that will have a clear proposal before April 1st 2008 (no joke). And that was only the policy of the Guild.

The board was also a point. As there were rumors about the chairmanship, all members were allowed to also vote for the chairman they wanted. Peter-Paul Koch eventually made it to chairman.

So, what about me being the future?

The chairman is not the only board member, there were three candidate board members as well, and I was one of them. The three of us were all allowed to introduce ourselves to everybody. My introduction began with: ‘I am young, I am the future.’. I wanted to make clear that I do not only want to care about the future of the Guild itself, but also about front-end developers in general. There are many professionals, but there will always be a need for new talent. With my participation in the Education Commission, besides being part of the board, I think I can care about that. By the way, I was voted right into the board.

More photos can be found in my Flickr set.

I was pleased when Tony and JD mailed me a few weeks ago, and asked if I wanted to be a judge at the CSS Off competition. Of course I said yes, and just all judges were announced.

There are six other judges, including Tony and JD themselves. Together we will look at the entries people can build within 24 hours. Next Saturday is the first competition we’ll judge together, feel free to attend. All you have to do is pick the design and code your best markup and style you can.

More important than winning, is sharing the knowledge we and all participants have. All entries are being commented with good and interesting points we came through. Also thinks we didn’t like are added, with some ideas how we would do it. Have a look at the previous results to see how extensive the entries are being judged.

I just came home from a meeting at Mirabeau where the Education Commission discussed about the plans and ideas. The Education Commission is part of the Guild of Front-Enders.

Before we really did something, there was pizzatime. Always good, in my opinion :) Therefore I would like to thank Wybe and Martin (employees at Mirabeau) to make that all possible.

I can’t tell much about our plans and ideas, it’s better to have that as a surprise. The plans are really concrete, so that’s pretty good (so no bla bla, but really doing something). At the congress of the GoFE next week Robert Jan (our chairman) will tell everybody in a few minutes what we want to achieve.

For the people who would love to see how it looked like over there at Mirabeau, here are some photos I took.