Laurens Holst résumé

Personalia

Previous work experience

1998-2004: Dutch TPG Mail
As a side-job during high school and some of my university, I have worked at the Dutch TPG Mail for over 6 years.
2004-now: Backbase
Currently I work at Backbase. Backbase is an internet technology company, which sells an AJAX framework based on XML and XHTML, and related services. I am currently a member of the R&D department. Since I work here, I have done many different things, amongst others JavaScript/XML programming, web application frontend/backend design and development (mainly using XML technologies), technical writing, testing, and consulting jobs for a few other companies. I specialise in web technologies and standards, and have implemented several web technologies such as CSS Selectors, XML Schema Datatypes and a forms framework.

Personal projects

In addition to these paid jobs, I have also worked on a lot of personal projects. Since about 1996 I have been involved in a number of Z80 assembly projects for the MSX computer, amongst others a disk magazine (‘Track’), music disks and several tools and never-finished games.

1999-2008: MSX fair Bussum
Since 1999 I have been organising the MSX fair in Bussum, one of the largest MSX fairs in the Netherlands. On this yearly fair, people who are interested in the MSX computer gathered to see new products, meet up with eachother, and discuss on various subjects ranging from games to programming and various other topics. This fair was the successor of the Zandvoort-fair, and during the first three years I co-organised the fair with Zandvoort’s Jaap Hoogendijk. The fair’s 10th anniversary in 2008 was the last.
2000-2001: MSX Resource Center
For about a year I have done ASP and MSSQL work at the www.msx.org community site, where I created amongst others the forums at the time. They have switched to a PHP based system since then, so little of it remains :(.
2003-now: MSX Assembly Page
Together with some other people I started the MSX Assembly Page, a comprehensive source of information for MSX programmers. I am the author of the design and most of its content. On this site, in the Track disk magazine, and with Backbase, I have gained a decent amount of experience writing technical documentation and articles.
2003-2008: Uitwijk film committee member
For a couple of years I have been a member of the film committee at the Parnassos cultural student centre of the Utrecht University. Each semester, we showed several movies a week for students, without fee. The movies were generally very diverse, ranging from hollywood blockbusters to indie films, slasher movies and animation.
2004-now: Personal website
As of 2004, I have a new personal website. This website is using a weblog system that I have built myself, using PHP and MySQL, and contains opinions, photos, programming projects, articles and resources for things that interest me.

My main interests nowadays are Web and XML technologies, such as XHTML, CSS, JS, XSLT, etc. I like spending time learning and reading up on these, and participate in several discussion fora on weblogs, mailinglists, etc. This is also what I do professionally.

Aside from these computer-related activities, I am and a fan of all things Japanese, and I have studied one year abroad in Japan. For a couple of weeks, I have organised a few meetings to watch anime at the university, but due to some setbacks this never really took off. Nowadays there is the JPCU though!

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