Profile

Meinte is an independent consultant, operating from Leiden, the Netherlands, and a dedicated software engineer with a passion for finding the "best fit" for his customer. He is an expert in applying model-driven methods and technology like code generation, domain modeling, and language engineering to drive software development towards higher productivity, higher quality and reduced time-to-market. He also is an experienced Java developer.

Meinte has strong analytic and conceptual skills, while remaining pragmatic. He is challenged by situations where standard solutions don’t suffice and innovation and change are important success factors. He is capable of acquiring both a helicopter and a microscopic view and combining these to come up with an optimal solution.

Meinte is accustomed to take initiative and not afraid to stand up for his professional opinion, but manages to do so in a team. He strives towards open and direct communication and is very much capable of voicing his ideas enthusiastically, in writing as well as verbally. He is reliable, knowledgeable and likes to coach co-workers.

Career

During his studies and after obtaining his Masters’ degree in Mathematics in 2002 at the university of Groningen, Meinte has worked for several years as a freelance software engineer, developing Web applications both independently as well as with a team. After that, Meinte has worked as a high-level application supporter for a software development company, which left him experienced in customer care and software maintenance.

Late 2005, Meinte took up employment with Atos Origin which saw him moving into the Java world, earning his keep maintaining and enhancing J2EE-based Web applications. Since beginning of 2007 Meinte has dedicated himself to creating innovative solutions, focusing on model-driven software engineering and applying that to software development and legacy modernization. In August 2008, Meinte took up employment with Capgemini Netherlands B.V. to further this quest.

As of early 2011, Meinte has made the move to become an independent consultant, focusing entirely on domain modeling and model-driven software development.

Languages

real-lifeproficiency
Dutchmother language
Englishexcellent, both orally and written
Germanmoderate
Frenchreasonable
Frysianmother language
programmingexperience
Java6 years of experience
Javascript2 years
Groovy2 years
ANSI C7 years (until 2002)
Perl8 years (until 2004 and version 5.0)
PHP4 years (until 2003)

Education

Master of Science/drs. in Mathematics, University of Groningen, obtained: August 2002.

Experience

Intuit - tech refresh

Period05-04-2011 - 30-09-2011
RoleDSL expert
Activitiesconsultancy on language development
TechnologyXtext/Xpand/Xtend (Eclipse EMF TMF), Eclipse, Java (Java6)

Intuit is a large supplier of consumer and small-business financial software.

Within Intuit, Meinte has consulted on two internal projects, providing advice on existing and future language implementations, showing various Best Practices, demoing a number of Proof-of-Concepts and making teams of software engineers more self-sufficient with the chosen technology.

Meinte's efforts have helped the team achieve short-term improvements, as well as paved the way for their mid- to long-term goals.

ProRail - Geluidsregister

Period03-05-2010 - 01-02-2011
Rolemodel-driven software engineer
Activitiesimplementation of code generation
TechnologyFornax/Sculptor, Xtext/Xpand/Xtend (Eclipse EMF TMF), Eclipse, Java (Java6), code generation

The ProRail GeluidsRegister is a central data warehouse system to monitor sound intensity measurements near train routes and tracks.

For the development project of this system, Meinte was asked to advice on the use of code generation to improve the developers’ productivity and time-to-market (which was necessary because of the short timelines) and to help with the implementation of it.

After having chosen appropriate open source code generation tooling, Meinte has helped to install that tooling and integrate it within the project, has customized the tooling to comply with the required target architecture and has provided knowledge transfer to the team regarding the tooling, effectively making the team self-sufficient.

The use of code generation has definitely allowed the project to boost its productivity and ability to deliver on time, while allowing the team to focus on the real difficulties.

ING - HomeBanking.be Export & Search

Period09-06-2010 - 08-07-2010
Rolesoftware architect
Activitieswriting SAD, specifying Web services
TechnologyJava (Java6), Eclipse (3.6 Helios), Web services (WSDL, XSD), Java Persistence API (JPA), EJB 3.x, Xtext and Xpand (Eclipse EMF)

The HomeBanking system for Belgian ING customers lacked functionality to export historical transaction data (journal items) to a textual or spreadsheet format. This data can only be obtained from a batch-oriented backend (mainframe) system. Capgemini has been asked to deliver a middleware solution which is able to orchestrate the export process by scheduling export requests, requesting exports with the backend systems, processing the results and making these available to the end user from a storage system.

Meinte was tasked with assisting the lead software architect in writing the Software Architecture Document and specifying the Web services provided by the middleware through a WSDL and XSDs, conforming to ING’s standards.

For specifying the WSDL and XSDs, Meinte has devised a solution based on Domain-Specific Languages which allowed himself and others on the project team to deliver these rapidly, even with changing requirements.

BNP Paribas Fortis - Pacific replacement

Period31-05-2010 - 17-06-2010
Rolesolution architect
Activitieswriting proposal

A proposal for the equi-functional replacement of the Pacific legacy system has been drafted on the basis of a combination of RUP and test-/behavior driven scenarios capturing the functionality and requirements of the current application.

Aegon - FHS replacement

Period01-04-2010 - 01-05-2010
Rolesolution architect
Activitieswriting proposal

Aegon has a mortgage mid-office system (FHS) whose maintenance process is increasingly complicated by legacy tooling. Therefore, Aegon issued a RfP to perform a technical migration of the software, after an earlier attempt at a functional rewrite by another system integrator turned out to be infeasible and not cost effective.

Meinte was tasked with devising a solution for Aegon. His experience in model-driven software engineering turned out to be instrumental in drafting a solution of which Capgemini was confident that it was the best fit for the customer, in that it both respected the desire for a technical migration while at the same time recognizing the intrinsic business value of the existing legacy software and re-using that value as much as possible.

Euroclear Bank Sa - Requirements Workbench

Period15-03-2010 - 25-04-2010
Rolesoftware engineer
Activitiescommunication, presentation
TechnologyIntentional Domain Workbench, Java, Eclipse, Swing (Jigloo)

Euroclear is an international clearing bank whose processes require a large amount of custom developed software. Euroclear’s in-house development capacity is not sufficient so the client has outsourced a large part of its design and implementation activities to Capgemini Belgium. A consequence of this is that the effort has moved from development to requirements gathering and technical specification, which severely threatens the intended reductions in cost and time-to-market. Euroclear, Capgemini en Intentional Software have partnered in a Proof-of-Concept for a Requirements Workbench based on the Intentional Domain Workbench tooling. This workbench allows Euroclear to gather and describe its requirements in a completely consistent and much more compact manner, which even allows the largest part of the required software to be directly generated from these descriptions.

Meinte served as the technical liaison between Euroclear, Capgemini and Intentional Software and was responsible for demoing the prototype Requirements Workbench during a number of presentations for Euroclear. His experience with and knowledge of model-driven engineering in general and the Intentional tooling in particular, as well as his aptitude of (technical) presentations, have clearly contributed to the success of the PoC and the presentations.

Capgemini (internal)- MDSD prototyping

Periods11-08-2010 - 01-02-2011, 08-02-2010 - 15-03-2010, 01-08-2008 - 24-10-2008
Rolesolution architect, MDSD engineer
Activitiesprototype building, MDSD evangelization
TechnologyJava, Eclipse, Xtext (Eclipse EMF TMF), Xpand, OSGi

Meinte has constructed Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) for various domains and deployed these in a Web/cloud fashion, with the intent to test the technical/architectural suitability and usability of these DSLs and the method of deployment. Among the domains are: IRMA, mortgage product descriptions and rules, descriptions of data models, descriptions of dynamic screen, XML schemas. With these DSLs, Meinte has "evangelized" MDSD within Capgemini.

Besides that, Meinte has contributed his experience to several proposals (RfIs, RfPs) and projects, both MDSD-specific and outside, and contributed to Capgemini's IP on MDSD and Legacy Modernization.

Allianz Nederland Levensverzekering N.V.

Period08-11-2008 - 05-02-2010
RoleMDSD engineer, J2EE developer
ActivitiesMDSD engineering, J2EE development
TechnologyJava (Java5), Eclipse (3.5 Galileo), (IBM) EGL, Groovy, Hibernate 3.0, Spring IoC (2.5), Spring MVC & WebFlow, UML modeling, code generation, Xtext & Xpand (DSL tooling)

Allianz needed a new mid-office system for the mortgages sales process, entailing both mortgage request processing as well as product catalogue management. Capgemini was responsible for the development of this Web-based mid-office system and executed it completely in-house, partly using right-shoring, partly using model-driven, UML-based methods and technologies (code generation) which enabled business analists and developers together to implement the application with a much higher productivity and quality than was otherwise possible.

Meinte was tasked with maintenance and enhancement of the proprietary MDSD tooling (UML profiles, Java code generator) as well as with developing part of the central use case of the application. Besides that, he was tasked with quality assurance on the source code and enhancing the development process.

Because of his expertise in MDSD, his ability to quickly "get to grips" with an existing application architecture and organization and his natural tendency to coach and challenge, Meinte has played a key role in turning this project into a development success.

ING.nl - Ringo documentation generation

Period15-08-2008 - 17-09-2008
RoleMDSD engineer
Activitiesimplementation of generation of UML diagrams
TechnologyIBM RSA/RSM 7, UML 2.1, Xtend (Eclipse EMF M2M/openArchitectureWare), Java

Ringo is an internally-facing ING application which is being maintained and enhanced by Capgemini. Because of lack of up-to-date and sufficiently detailed documentation on the level of software components, ING and Capgemini have chosen to track and log the actual runtime behavior of the application in order to derive interaction diagrams.

Meinte was tasked with implementing tooling to automatically transform the logged tracing information into UML Sequence Diagrams. He was able to do this quickly because of his prior experience with model-to-model transformation technology and UML. This has led to an significant reduction of the documentation effort required because a large amount of data was quickly and repeatedly transformable in ready-to-use, completely accurate and correct UML models.

Atos Origin - Legacy Transformation Factory

Period16-08-2007 - 01-08-2008
Rolesolution engineer
TechnologyUML modeling, Eclipse EMF (Xpand, Xtend, Xtext: openArchitectureWare), Java, Relativity tooling

The Software Development & Maintenance Center (Emerging Technologies) wanted to set up a Legacy Transformation Factory for efficiently transforming legacy software to a modern, more future-proof and maintainable form, with a focus towards transforming COBOL software to J2EE applications.

Meinte’s task was to envision, create and manage all the technical details which were required for this innovative technologies. To this end, he has developed several technologies and components and drafted methodology and process designs for the Legacy Transformation Factory, as well as performing reviews on third-party legacy modernization tools. Besides that, Meinte has helped several projects out by implementing technological and process improvements, mainly based on model-driven software development. He has also participated in a number of bids which were not directly related to his primary field of interest.

Kamer van Koophandel - Handelsregister

Period15-12-2006 - 01-08-2007
Rolesolution architect, MDSD engineer
ActivitiesMDSD engineering, J2EE development
TechnologyUML modeling, Eclipse EMF (Xpand, Xtend, Xtext: openArchitectureWare), Java, Relativity tooling

The Chamber of Commerce (KvK) has a large number of COBOL applications, running on (physical) IBM AS/400 mainframes. To be able to guarantee future-proofness of these systems, KvK wanted to see whether a (semi-)automatic transformation of such legacy software was possible in order to reduce migration costs and dependence on knowledge which had partially left the organization.

Atos Origin was asked to come up with a Proof-of-Concept for such a modernization approach, based on model-driven engineering. The central idea was to use the existing source code to reverse engineer the requirements into a formal, consistent and verifiable application model and to generate modern software (J2EE) directly from that.

Meinte was tasked with building a large part of the actual solution, using the Application Modernization Workbench tooling of Relativity (now part of MicroFocus) to parse and process the legacy COBOL sources.

Meinte has played a key role in the development of every aspect of the eventual solution which was able to transform a significant part of the legacy system under consideration, not in the least by inspiring and guiding the whole team.

Ahold/Albert Heijn - WiSE, Momo, Pallas

Period01-05-2006 - 31-12-2006
RoleJava/J2EE developer
Activitiesmaintenance and enhancement of J2EE applications
TechnologyRelevant technologies: Java (Java1.4), J2EE (JSP, JSTL, tag libs), Struts, PDA hardware, Windows CE

Albert Heijn has numerous in-house Java/J2EE applications to support their operations, among which are the WiSE software for store employees’ hand-held computers, the Momo store goods ordering system and the MicroStrategy-based Pallas business intelligence software.

Meinte was tasked with taking over the maintenance for these systems from other system integrators (Capgemini, E-id!), performing corrective and adaptive maintenance and enhancements.