I'm Elco Bouma, born in 1975 in the Netherlands. Welcome ! Started programming way back in the early 80's at age 8 on a Commodore 64 mostly basic (computing the sprites by hand :-) but also a bit machine language. Typing over listings out of programming books, kept me busy for long times, but also learned me the basics of programming and especially thinking logically. When the Commodore Amiga came out in 1985, I ofcourse begged my parents for it. Programming lots of demo's like "James Brown is Dead" in assembler that period, most prominent one was "The Afterlife", getting the most out of the Amiga hardware. Entered a national programming contest from Commodore with a game called Hyper in 1990. The music was done by a schoolmate Kasper Peters, the graphics and programming were done by me. We became second ! That was a nice achievement. Then went to study Artificial Intelligence at the Free University in Amsterdam. During my time as a student played lots of snooker, pool and darts and created Dutch Darts Revelation in Visual Basic. This game was published on CD-Rom by Dynamite under the name Darts Challenge Game.
Dutch Darts Revelation - Darts Trainer
Doing my internship at Nedap-CTP, working on their own created NOPN-2 software for unmanned gas stations. Creating interfaces with gas station pumps, pin terminals and point of sale systems. Also did my graduation project there, an Anti Drowning System for swimming pools. Using real time video capturing and image processing techniques in Java (!). It ran on a pentium 3 500mhz pc, processing streams of multiple video camera's around the swimming pool. Many thanks again to everyone there at nedap-ctp that made it possible to test the system in a real swimming pool!
Got my "Master of Science" in Artificial intelligence degree in 2000, it was broadcasted on national tv as breaking news.
After graduation started working at Summaest on HP-Nonstop systems, used at banks for processing millions of pin transactions. Worked on an EBPP (Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment) system, and pioneered with using Java and the first java webservers (Silverstream, anybody ? :-) )on those systems.
Then moved to a seperate company called Interfaktuur to rewrite the EBPP system from a Consolidator EBPP Model to a Direct Billing model. It was used by some oil companies for publishing their invoices on their own website for their customers. After a few years the company was taken over by MIQ-Europe where I worked on the software part of a track&trace system called Mobilox for vehicles. It registered trips of vehicles and more data with proprietry made hardware. As part of the EBPP proposition also created DigiNota and "De Digitale Brievenbus" website for TNT-Post at that time with a tab integrated into Microsoft's "MSN Messenger".
Created a plugin for Windows Media Center called J2MCE which was kind of the first appstore for Mediacenter. Also working on my own home assistant called James which was based on Clips from the Nasa using the Java version called JESS. It is a rule based system, an expert system shell in which you assert facts and logic rules to reason about them. Pretty fun to work and make stuff with. I created my own hardware interface to Klik aan Klik uit devices. And other devices used the X11 protocol.
Then in 2009 moved to the internal projects team at Devoteam, developing and maintaining Java and .Net projects for banks and staffing companies. Focus is mainly on web applications written in Java with at first Struts 2 and now Springboot and Angular and also .Net (Core) websites for example:
https://me.devoteam.com/case-study/devoteam-builds-smart-cloud-solution-ict-broker/
Microsoft started the "Indy Games" project in 2009 where it enabled game developers to release a game on the xbox 360. Well, that would be a dream come true. How cool would it be, your own game on a console!
So in 2010 I released Darts Arena for the Xbox 360, created with XNA in C#.
It did pretty well and even was mentioned in a japanese games magazin. (Still don't know if it says anything bad about it :-)