Hi there, I am Arjan de Knegt, living in the Netherland near Amsterdam and working at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

Enjoy my small bio and background below

How it started

I have been in Technology business for a quite some time now, starting in the almost stone age of the 1990’s. Already during my final Ir. thesis on “Exploitation costs of Mainframe- and LAN applications” at Technical University Delft, I concluded that IT Operations was maybe not my best choice and that I was much more fitting in a Development environment

So I started my career as a developer. But is was not just development I liked. I was also interested in preparation, organisation and management of the projects I was involved in. So I drifted away from actual development to Information Analysis, Project Manager, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer and becoming an Agile believer. Done great projects and helped great teams and -trains (see https://scaledagileframework.com) grow and flourish.

Technology

But technology was never far away, if it was not at the job, it was in my private time. Some of the things done and liked:

  • Fully trained to be a C++ developer at my first job (but never got a client assignment on that)
  • Made Cobol programs (even old at that time) at my first client
  • Did 4GL programming in Uniface at KLM
  • Experimented with Python and made websites with the still brilliant Plone CMS (https://plone.org)
  • Made a few Joomla CMS websites (https://joomla.org)
  • Tried some Javascript and Angular
  • Ran several docker containers
  • Programmed many Arduino’s and Raspberry PI’s
  • Looked into Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io), although I am still very much a beginner in home automation

The Challenge

And now Java. Why Java you may ask?

First of all, I needed a challenge and a goal. “Inspired” by the Covid lockdowns and the focus on R&D and Learning at my employer KLM. So I started with the goal: My team at KLM creates Java API’s, and I want to be able to read and understand their code. Useful? Not sure, but it is a challenge for sure.

But just learning Java is not the end goal, would be too easy right? So there are a few more things I have in mind as next steps:

  1. Yes, learn Java of course to start
  2. And learn Spring Framework and familiarise with the most important Java Design Patterns
  3. But also create a full CI/CD pipeline that tests and deploys the code at home (Jenkins?)
  4. Run everything in Docker containers, maybe even with Kubernetes, so future move to the cloud should be relatively easy.
  5. And, maybe the biggest challenge: write a regular blog about my experiences

And there is probably a point 6 as well: find a challenging case to use my new skills…

The kickoff

If there is anything I learned from working (scaled) agile, it is that at some point you just have to start. Don’t overthink it, if you consider all the consequences you will probably never get underway.

So I started the “Java Programming Masterclass (Java 11 & Java 17)” by Tim Buchalka at Udemy.com (https://www.udemy.com/course/java-the-complete-java-developer-course/). 80 hours of video, 21+ chapters, many challenges and coding exercises.

Turns out this fits my rhythm quite well. The videos and exercises are short, so usually I can do one or two when social life permits.

And is it fun? Yes sure, it is for me. Many concepts come back from the depth of my memory, but really good to do it all from the very basics (including the obligatory “Hello world”). Am I progressing fast? Not really. I have done 3 middle sized chapters in about a months (status early February 2022), but there are much larger and more complex chapters to come. My remedy: no planning. Just every day/week a next topic and we’ll see where it ends

Want to know how it goes and if I will succeed?

Well, then you have to regularly read my blog posts at https://adeknegt.nl