Jethro Borsje

On Sunday the 7th of April Fenneke and I decided to go hiking near Sluis at an area protected by a foundation called "Zuid-Hollands Landschap". This foundation tries to preserve some of the more natural areas of the Dutch state of Zuid-Holland. We like this foundation because of its local initiatives for the preservation of places close to our home.

At the location of our hike are lots of water birds such as various kinds of ducks, geese, swans, storks, herons, etc. For a while now we are hoping to spot a Purple Heron, but April is to soon in the year for this. Nevertheless we spotted various other interesting birds, most notably a Northern Shoveler. We didn't see this bird before, so we were happy to finally spot one. It's nice to look at with its large spatulate bill and bright colors. Sadly we couldn't take a great picture of this beautiful bird, but at least we saw one in real life. We enjoyed the hike a lot and are planning to come back here another time.

Bellow are some pictures and a GPS track log:



View 2013-04-07 - Hiking @ Sluis in a larger map

Two weeks ago I participated in an in-house training provided by a company called Good Technology. They provide an infrastructure and SDK for making secure mobile apps on both iOS and Android. The first part of the training explained the details of their infrastructure. The idea behind it all is that apps are running a secure sandbox on a mobile device. This sandbox is managed by the Good Platform and the data inside is heavily encrypted. Network communications to backend servers is done securely via Good servers which in turn have access to the internal application servers using Good Proxy. That way your application servers do not have to be publicly accessible.

Good comes shipped with several enterprise apps which work this way for reading e-mail, managing your calendar and sharing files. By using the Good Dynamics SDK companies can build their own apps leveraging the secure context of the Good platform and the underlying infrastructure. The SDK is non evasive for developers because it basically contains custom implementations for iOS and Android framework classes. By using the Good version of these classes your app becomes secure by default. As a developer you don't have to worry about encryption, decryption and secure network communication, this is all handled by the Good Platform and by Good Dynamics.

I was pretty impressed by the level of sophistication and yet ease of use of the Good Platform and SDK and am looking forward to using it in practice. The only downside of the training was that I had to leave it every now and then to attend to a production issue, so in the end I did not have the time to take the exam for the official certification. Nevertheless I am confident I have all the necessary knowledge to start using Good.

Earlier this year, in the beginning of January, we went to Winterberg expecting to be able to ski for a couple of days. However, during that time there was hardly any snow in Winterberg and we weren't able to go skiing at all. A couple of days after we returned home after that first trip it started to snow heavily throughout Europe. This snow period turned out to be quite long so after our ski trip to the Alps there was still lots of snow in Winterberg. Fenneke and I decided to head for Winterberg once more, this time for just two days, to finish of our winter seasons with two more days of skiing.

We drove to Winterberg early Monday morning the 25th of March, after about three and a half ours of driving we arrived at the slopes at around 10:00. After drinking some tea we quickly bought our two-day ski passes and started to hit the slopes. The snow conditions were a bit different than in the Alps, because there is more artificial snow in Winterberg. The sun was shining the entire day, but because of strong winds it was still quite cold. The ski area of Winterberg isn't very big, so after a few hours of skiing we did all the slopes and used all the ski lifts. Despite the size there were a couple of short black runs which were quite nice, the red and blue slopes were very suitable for practicing our technique so we had a great time. We kept on skiing until all the ski lifts shut down at 17:00 after which we drove to the center of Winterberg to check in to our B&B. We ended our day with a great typical German dinner with schnitzels in a nice restaurant in the center of town. The next day we started the day early so we could hit the slopes as soon as the ski lifts opened. We did a lot of practicing and had a great time again. The sun was still shining the entire time and the wind was a little less strong, so the conditions were perfect! We ended the day at 17:00 again after which we had dinner and drove back home.

Although the ski area of Winterberg isn't very large it's a great place to go for two or three days. If you're going with small children or if you're a beginner it might even be a good idea to go for a week. It's cheaper then the large ski areas in the Alps and still lots of fun.

Bellow are some pictures of this trip:

We ended up skiing 50,5 km on the first day and 52,7 km on the second day. Bellow are the GPS track logs of this trip:

View 2013-03-25 - Skiing @ Winterberg in a larger map

View 2013-03-26 - Skiing @ Winterberg in a larger map

This year we didn't go skiing in Les Trois Vallées like the last couple of years. We decided it was time to explore a new ski region and we selected Paradiski, which is in the French Alps very close to Les Trois Vallées. Paradiski is a little smaller than Les Trois Vallées, but that's not a surprise as Les Trois Vallées is the biggest ski area in the world. Paradiski has 425 km of pistes, ranging from very easy blue ones to around twenty black expert runs.

There was an amazing amount of snow in the Alps this year, so the quality of the slopes was very good. During the first half of our week it was very cold. Temperatures of under -30 degrees Celsius were reported, so good warm clothes were an absolute must. We enjoyed ourselves a lot in the new ski area although we felt we had to do a lot of blue slopes to reach the more challenging red and black ones. On the other hand there were a couple of black slopes which were pretty demanding which made it all worth while.

I took my GPS with me almost every day and this resulted in some nice GPS track logs and statistics. The logs are not complete, because sometimes my battery died. These are the distances I managed to record:

Bellow you'll find some pictures of our trip:

And finally the GPS track logs for those who are interested:

View 2013-02-23 - Skiing @ Paradiski in a larger map

View 2013-02-26 - Skiing @ Paradiski in a larger map

View 2013-02-27 - Skiing @ Paradiski in a larger map

View 2013-02-28 - Skiing @ Paradiski in a larger map

View 2013-03-01 - Skiing @ Paradiski in a larger map

Today I went to an Agile / Scrum workshop at the Cibit Acadamy. It was a one day training session which introduced the fundamentals of agile software development and the scrum framework in particular. One of the things I liked the most is the iterative nature of the development process which allows for adjustments in the requirements during the lifetime of a project. The scrum framework is all about visual information radiators which physically shows the progress during a sprint, the items in the backlog and the tasks on which a team is currently working. During the workshop we talked about the different roles in a scrum project such as the Scrum Master, Product Owner and the Development Team. Another interesting topic was the different events defined in the scrum framework such as the daily stand up meeting, sprint planning meeting and the retrospective.

When implementing scrum fully commitment from higher level management is unbearable and quite ambitious. In the short run I want to try to incorporate a few things into our daily routine to start reaping some of the benefits of agile software development.