It has been twenty years already!
Twenty years since I started my professional career. Of course, I had some side-gigs during college and a couple of internships, but I’m not counting those. After graduating in January 2005, my first real job started on February 1st, 2005, as a software engineer at Ordina, a large consultancy company in the Netherlands.

Over the years I’ve had the privilege to work with quite a few awesome persons, work on great projects and doing stuff I always dreamed of. I’ll reflect a bit in this post and say thanks to some of the people who have been the most influential in my career.

The start

My career started at Ordina as a software engineer. The team was responsible for creating (enterprise) applications on Pocket PC/PDA handhelds. Do you still remember those?
The operating system back then was Pocket PC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 5.0 later. The .NET Framework was still new during this time and on these mobile devices we had to resort using the Nano Framework or Compact Framework (if lucky). We weren’t that lucky, so had to use a very stripped-down version of C++. Most of the time we couldn’t use the ATL or MFC libraries due to hardware constraints.
I had not learned C++ during college, so that was a steep learning curve. My team consisted of some great colleagues who are experts in this field who were able to learn me a lot on how to build an application and user experiences on mobile devices. The latter has certainly helped me a lot later in my career, because mobile devices have become quite important this day and age.