Introduction: what & how?

"Implementing Domain Driven Design" is a book written by Vaughn Vernon, and you can consider it a practical guide to the blue book - a lot of people consider the blue book to be used as a reference, but it takes some persistence to read it -. Vaughn tried to solve exactly that problem with his book...

"implementing domain driven design" by @vaughnvernon has arrived #YesYesYes #DDD #IDDD twitter.com/ToJans/status/…

— Tom Janssens (@ToJans) 13 februari 2013

A little while ago, Vaughn Vernon was tweeting about how had given a free course about his book "Implementing domain driven design" while visiting Bogota, Columbia. This course was given for free to help start-ups there.

My free one-day #IDDD Tutorial will be held in #Bogota #Colombia from 8:30am-6pm Monday Oct 8 at @hubbog Calle 98 # 18-71 Second Floor.

— Vaughn Vernon (@VaughnVernon) 5 oktober 2012

In the next few hours after this tweet, an idea emerged on twitter about a concept called the IDDDtour, where Vaughn would be teaching his book to larger classes and doing a tour through Europe, but at a fraction of the cost. As I am somebody who is more of a head first kind of guy, I decided to take ownership and figure out a way to make this a real thing...

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Note: I would like to thank @gbarrs for reviewing my blog post almost instantly, and also the offer of @GraemeF, @MarkRendle, @swaggerdmangene and @moldyseaswimmer to be a reviewer. Without them, there would be a lot more Dunglish in this post...

Why I like my job.

I have been hooked into computers ever since I wrote my first few lines of Basic on my mothers' brand new TRS-80 Model 3 with 64Kb of ram and 2 - yes 2 !!! - diskdrives of a whopping 178Kb. (Actually, I did not write the code, but I copied it character by character from a textbook that might have looked like this, but in my defense, I was about 7 years old).

The first program probably looked like this:

10 PRINT "HI, WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

20 INPUT N$

30 PRINT "HELLO, ",N$

Exciting, is it not? In the five years that followed, I learned almost every in and out of this machine, where to peek and poke in memory, how to set pixels on the screen (monochrome, 128x48 resolution, imagine that), which ASCII codes to send to my dot matrix printer to switch control modes, ...

When I was about twelve years old, I had written a drawing application, complete with circles, boxes, Bresenham lines, and even the possibility to print the graphics on the (very noisy) dot matrix printer (remember those printers which had to print on chained paper?).

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Introduction

This is a follow-up post to the post from yesterday. While the first day was really nice, the second day was completely different.

Meeting people

After a good night of sleep and some breakfast at our AirBnb host, Geert and I got back to the venue. As this was our second day, we seemed to have less challenges handling the Irish traffic in our "Fiat Cinquecento". As we arrived there, we met up with Pieter again we had a small chat about the event he had the night before, had some coffee and a small breakfast (I love the catering at Web Summit), finished some things I had to do on my laptop, and started socializing.

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Introduction

When Geert from Paycento asked me to join him and Pieter to Ireland for THE start-up convention in Ireland named Web Summit, I immediately agreed to join them for the following reasons:

• Paycento is still very active, even though we do not blog about it currently.
• Web Summit is probably the biggest conference for start-ups in Europe, so there is an interesting buzz here, with some really interesting speakers.
• I love interacting with people I do not know yet, especially when we do share similar interests.
• You get to see a whole new world out there, with opportunities you could not even imagine thinking about.
• And, last but not least: "Is grá liom Éire" - that is Gaelic for "I love Ireland" - even though it has been over 10 years ago I spent a few days here, I really like the way Irish people interact and socialize.

Here is an overview of our first day!!!

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Note: this is a post from a blog post series about starting up 10 businesses in a year.

#1: http://Blommekes.Be - koopt een blommeke voor u vrouw en het zal wa beter gaan

Introduction

The biggest problem in getting started with startups, is finding your inspiration, and deriving a business plan; in this post I will describe how blommekes.be was conceived, and also mistakes, lessons learned during the process.

Inspiration

After the idea of starting 10 startups in a year was conceived, this was the first startup that I conceived together with Pieter from Taalvirtuozen.

We brainstormed for for about 3 nights straight to find a good idea. The brainstorming process was pretty straightforward: we shared a powerpoint file in google docs, and started adding ideas at random (one per page) while babbling over Skype together. We found our inspiration by surfing the net, (i.e. news sites etc), thinking about where we could find new markets and/or opportunities.

After these 3 nights, we decided to pick an idea and go for it. The odd thing was that we conceived the idea of blommekes.be during that night; the minute we imagined it, we assumed that this would be a perfect match for our first startup: blommekes.be.

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Finally !!

It has been a while since I blogged about my project #startup10, and there has been a reason for that... In the past months I have been talking quite a lot with a former colleague of mine, who co-founded a start-up, but on a whole different scale/level as my 2 utterly simple experiments.

After having to keep my mouth shut for over a month - which was, as for those of you who know me, quite hard -, I am finally allowed to tell the world I am joining the start-up www.paycento.com .

Paycento ? WHUT ? What's that ?

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We zitten in de problemen in ons landje; hoe zou U als ondernemer het probleem aanpakken ? #BeterBelgie

Het geld is op, de mensen komen op straat, er is schrik voor de economische malaise en verdere implicaties er van, ...

Als ondernemer zit U dagelijks in gelijkaardige situaties: uw acties hebben niet alleen impact op producten en bedrijven, maar ook op mensen in een directe of indirecte manier. Bijgevolg heeft het merendeel van U een soort van zesde zintuig ontwikkeld om dergelijke problemen op te lossen.

Daarom wil ik aan U als ondernemers vragen: welke suggestie heeft u voor de overheid ? Hoe kunnen we de problemen in dit land op een pragmatische en efficiënte manier gaan oplossen? Ik vraag dus geen gepalaver vanuit de ivoren toren, maar concrete en uitvoerbare oplossingen die het verschil maken.

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