Opinions are mine, and reflect experiences and insights. They might be helpful for you or they might not be, they come with no warranty and you should have no expectation, apart that they might be mildly amusing to read.

June 9, 2020

It's time for the next step in SEPA

The first step in SEPA was the Euro, the second one was IBAN and SCT/SDD schemes implementation, and I propose the third one is enabling inclusion and mobility.

As I stumbled across the article from Lars Markull, “Brief history of IBANs and current Fintech challenges” it stirred up some thinking and ideas I was having in the past.

The article is a great source on what exactly IBANs are, but that is irrelevant for the end user. The interesting part is the struggle these have had with the change from their regular and accustomed (local) BBAN to the (worldwide) standardised IBAN. This struggle is still happening on a day to day basis for a lot of people, but over time is less visible (people get by, they ‘survive’). It’s like most people above a certain age are used to think of value or relative value in their local currency still, even though the Euro was introduced in 2002 already.

May 22, 2020

Digital Signup - Iterate, Iterate and when done, improve even more

I started my professional career in the Telecom Industry in the end of the 90s, bringing a service to consumers (Internet Access Provider) that was turning from somewhat niche (BBS, UseNet, …) into mainstream offering (Connection, Portal, Search, Web, Hosting…).

The Internet Access Provider made big strides in digitalisation, where it was easy because we could assume that everybody who wanted to surf the Internet had at least a computer. But we had started out with mailing (snail mail) or faxing signup forms, that resulted us sending back an “Access Kit”. Very analog way to sell essentially a digital service, but in those days you needed a CD (or floppy), with software (browser was not standard), drivers, config etc… Think analog modems, computers without essential software, and every setup a little bit unique in its own way - Heck Windows 3.11 early days of Windows 95. This worked great and I remember we were lugging daily 2-3 big mail bags filled with connection kits to the central post office in Brussels.

February 7, 2020

Banking landscape (r)evolution

Today’s landscape of traditional Banks and Institutions versus Neobanks and FinTechs is in for some big waves and changes.

The traditional banks have been able to “digitalize” with mixed success. They implemented the mandatory systems in order to stay relevant and continue to participate in the systems that provide foundational services. In these highly specialized settings while being dragged down by legacy systems and siloed organization, heavily impacted by 90 IT paradigms, most environments are not appealing for the CS engineer under 30 years old.

January 13, 2020

Empathy

Back in 2017, I was interviewing people for a position as a system administrator. I have been adamant about DevOps, and obviously this was a specific question around what the opinion of the candidate was around DevOps.

Over the course of the years, I have heard many people ‘define’ the term, explaining either what it meant as a solution, some were more considerate about the collaboration and mindset aspects.

But this candidate floored me. I was speechless when he answered and his answer haunted me ever since.

January 6, 2020

Scrum

Some of my personal thoughts, observations and discussions I had on Scrum, as being a method to be Agile.

There are lot of opinions on Scrum, and it’s very easy to be carried away by the Agile Evangelists, completely forgetting the objective and the problem is targeted to be solved by Scrum.

Scrum is a way of working of a team

Scrum basically means that a team commits to deliver something in a pre-defined timeframe.

November 2, 2019

Home, sweet home

Wel we can have gathered most beautiful website, if it’s not possible for people visiting it, then it’s useless.

Publishing content is what this is all about in the first place.

You can be the greatest writer that never got published, the best painter of your generation that has no space in an exhibition, the best singer songwriter that has no audience. If you create, you need to get your stuff out there.

October 30, 2019

Static, so you don't need coding skills right?

So static websites, means there is no code? Could not be more wrong…

From the JAM stack website they provide some best practices and example. There are choices to be made, and each have advantages and disadvantages, making it easy but not sophisticated or sophisticated and too complex.

Long over are the days of me designing web sites, so I needed a setup with Themes capabilities and a well stocked offering of choices in that area.

January 2, 2019

Setting up a website context

I have been a webmaster since I started my professional career. I was lucky to work at the biggest Belgian ISP in the nineties.

I was responsible for all web properties, from the “users” server, the corporate web site, The marketing website, to the Belcast portal (later merged into Skynet.be).

Those where the days, the early days. We used a lot of open source, got stuff working with Apache, added dynamic content using cgi. Went a bit further and generated every page using Perl (yay). This made it possible to personalise the page for the user.

January 1, 2019

Introduction

This is a lab site, an experiment, something that could be pretty cool, or could go awfully wrong.

I’m looking at using technologies that are new to me (mostly cloud based stuff). The first thing I’m looking into is Amazon Web Services.

More specifically, figuring out lambda’s, DynamoDB, anything server less.

The main goal is to be doing, tinkering, breaking, making. Reading is easy, it ignites the imagination, but it doesn’t take real limitations into account.