30+ years in IT

My own release date lies in 1961 (a few days late and remained beta...). I majored in analytical chemistry but decided my future wasn't in the details necessary for a scientific career. I started my 15+ years in higher education as staffer, information analist and project manager and ended up as head of IT. I was present at the birth of Internet in the Netherlands, known as AMS-IX nowadays. Shortly after the dotcom crash I decided to return to web technology and founded Solide. From 2017 Solide is a single person business, giving me more freedom in assignments and spend time on socially relevant activities (like teaching asylum seekers).
I'm analytical - but not cold, keen on problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking. I'm agile by nature but easily annoyed with big claims from any methodology. Soft skills are just as important as hard skills (but maybe that's because there are better coders out there...).

I'm an open source advocate. If well done it gives clients freedom of choice, lowers costs, enhances flexibility and improves security. It gives developers an opportunity for world wide collaboration and continous improvement.
Drupal is well done in many ways. The framework is architecturally sound, the community vast, alive and rather inclusive, commercial and community interests are well seperated (Acquia versus Drupal Association). Drupal is also very flexible; Drupal is both a Content Management System and a framework, albeit one that has a Graphical User Interface (for some coders that's a no-no). The result is you can build almost anything on Drupal, whether you're a programmer or not.

My own focus with Drupal has shifted from site building to prototyping and building web based applications. I'm forever evaluating new contributions. I do the requirements analysis, project planning and develop both front- and backend (a rare breed nowadays) and also operate my own dedicated servers (but system maintenance & security expertise as well as most visual design is hired - I know my limitations too).

I find Drupal for prototyping especially rewarding. If you're interested in low-code platforms like Mendix or Outsystems but don't have the budget - or you don't want to be restrained by a closed source provider - Drupal can be a viable alternative. In short iterations it's possible to build at least a skeletal application that's easily made visually attractive. If that's a minimum viable product: go ahead. If not, you can re-develop it (in Drupal or something else) or transfer it to some other development shop. It's open source, after all...

I also audit existing Drupal sites and I've assisted development shops in cleaning/resurrecting broken Drupal sites.

You are temporarily understaffed. You want somehing changed. You want someone who can translate business to IT or vice versa. You want someone who comes to the heart of the matter in minutes. Who you can trust.

You might want me.

I have experience with drafting requirements, leading teams, estimating costs. I've also worked with many different project management tools, like MS Project, Basecamp or Teamwork.

Let's have a talk together and see if there's a match. If not, we probably enjoyed it anyhow!

Sustainability is easily one of the biggest challenges mankind faces. Life Cycle Assessments or LCA are a fundamental tool in helping achieve our goals. Calculating the environmental impact of a product is left to experts, who use error-prone tools to do the calculations. Change something and start all over again. 

Solide's webbased LCA tool ends all that. It's easy to use with guided forms and validated input. It shows results in easy to grasp graphs and tables and let you zoom in on specific environmental factors (like carbon dioxide or phosphate) if you need to.

The tool uses environmental datasets or you upload environmental profiles yourself. It's easilty adapted to your branch and products. 

Contact me for a quote.

I'm maintainer for the Calendar contribution on drupal.org. In 2004 we built one of the first online scheduling tools on the market. Nowadays it's just Google Calendar or Outlook, so it seems. But there's still room for dedicated online calendaring tools. Ask Feyenoord, one of the leading BVO's in Dutch soccer. 

The marketing (or group) calendar combines all the flexibility from Drupal with the visual interface of a Calendar. You can easily define your own content structures and colorize events based on specific business rules. You can grant permission to access, edit or delete events with the fine-grained levels of detail Drupal provides. There's a demo available at https://demo.marketingkalender.eu

Contact me for a quote.

You think Drupal might be beneficial to your organisation. But you need more information. And surely you don't want to become completely dependent on suppliers. Or at minimum you want to be able to review proposals suppliers come up with. 

So it's time to get your feet on the ground and learn Drupal yourself. I can help you with that. I've done workshops for content managers, site builders and developers (alltough combining them in one group introduces some challenges). And if necessary I can stay around untill you're comfortable with Drupal yourself. My goal is to make you know as much - or more - about Drupal as I do.

Contact me for a quote.

Through the years I've worked for many different clients. Some moved on but stayed with Drupal, some moved elsewhere, some ventured into development themselves, some stayed. Typical development budgets are in the 5 to 25K range, site building can be done for as little as 1K, depending on specs and if we have a "click". Some notable clients: