About me

My name is Roderik Muit. I am available in the designs 'suit' and 'geek'. A combination of those is also possible ;-)
(And if you'd like to know me through knowing the usual statistics and my connections, you can check my LinkedIn, FaceBook or InterNations profile.)

I've been around since april 27th, 1974. I'm single, and currently (temporarily) without a fixed place to live. That might sound strange but both things are to my complete comfort.
(I own 2 apartments in Amsterdam & Utrecht, The Netherlands, which I rented out for half a year or more. From October 2008 to February 2009 I lived in Budapest, Hungary, with the intention of helping to start a growing pan-European Drupal company from their new location. Right now I'm staying with friends in the USA, while working out the next step into the future.)

I have been working in the Internet / IT-business (and living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) from January 1995, having started my working life at 20 (after 1.5 years of studying at Delft Technical University). The first 4.5 years were spent working at the RIPE NCC which I've seen growing from 7 to 65 people in that timeframe, first doing 'customer relationship administration', then Perl programming and Unix system administration. After that I was employed at Koster Engineering, working together with a close high school friend on database programming in Visual Basic / Microsoft Access.

I've been self employed from April 2004. In my period in Amsterdam (until 2008) I've had only two major assignments, at ABN AMRO bank and at Tommy Hilfiger Europe. Both assignments started out as a project for one or a few months, but ended up having me around as long as possible (until the role of a non-permanent employee was not feasible anymore.) I have done smaller assignments at the same time, a.o. with Koster Engineering, in order to be able to keep my official status as a 'one-man company'.

After it became apparent that my chances at a freelance job in the financial industry had diminished, I decided to turn to Drupal; a system which had known as a user for 4 years. Building on an information-sharing platform is something I'd love to do professionally. I am also attracted to the 'community spirit' that is present in the Drupal world, (In short: an international group of professionals with their own employers/clients, still have a common goal: maintaining and perfecting a well working system -Drupal in this case. I like investing my programmer time into this. The typical atmosphere of a mixture of technical and business people which is present at Drupal conferences, is familiar to what I know from my RIPE NCC time.)

At my first DrupalCon (Szeged in August 2008) I met up with the owners of VoiceHero and got hired on the spot. I have lived in Budapest for a while, learned a lot, however in February 2009 the time had come to move on.
Since then I'm back in The Netherlands, building a new network and client base from the ground up.

My future is likely to consist of the Drupal business, though I'm open to being hired as a 'VBA consultant' on a project somewhere.

Future dreams / things on the side

I've consciously created a situation for myself where I could go abroad for any period of time without 'burning any bridges' at home in The Netherlands. Expertise in programming on a 'web application framework' which is used all over the world, gives opportunities to see some other parts of the world.

That sense of freedom is still in the back of my head, even though I'm now in The Netherlands rebuilding a network. This is why I'm not really looking for a long term job with an employer.

Though it is not visible in the work I do so far, I am inclined to 'thinking about society, its future and my role in it'. Especially during my 'banking days' I was convinced that there should be more useful ways of spending my time than 'working full time automating big company administrations in the safe haven of Amsterdam', and aware that I have the possibility to do so. This is another reason to perhaps see to a totally different part of the world. Experience in ICT is almost the only thing I have - but could I use that to e.g. do some 'redistribution of income' somewhere? Who knows... but I don't know how (yet)...

There are no fixed plans. In the meantime, something else has come up. I'm now the treasurer/secretary of a Dutch foundation that supports 'free speech' related projects. Its name is Stichting BCCO (and frankly, I should still revise the wording of the "Background Philosophy" section and get some more pages together). It wasn't started by me but the whole thing is growing on me. In the past years I'm experiencing more and more, that the way society handles its 'freedom of speech' actually does not lead to a better understanding of the truth, because too many people seem to be afraid of the negative personal effects of 'speaking out for themselves, against pervasive untruths'. (In the Netherlands, this is quite apparent in the 'Islam debate' which is going on, and in what details of that debate are not going on.)

What will happen next? We'll see.