Nice to meet you!

My name is Erik van Eykelen and I'm a geek, entrepreneur and software developer. Born in 1968, raised in The Netherlands, living mostly in France, entrepreneur since 1989.

Founded (and sold) three companies (Mediapoint, HVE and BackStream) prior to becoming an independent technical advisor 1466 days ago. I now work for (international) customers and startups (full-time for Glaxstar since mid 2007. Glaxstar is the company behind the widely used Firefox add-ons for eBay, Yahoo/Delicious and Digg). In my spare time I read a lot, watch movies, run, sail, follow university courses and work on pet research projects.

Technical skills:

• Architecting and building small and large-scale server applications, web sites and desktop apps;
• 'Specifying by hacking' mock-ups of server-side applications using Ruby (+Rails) and Java;
• Writing concise specifications and functional and technical designs;
• Extensive knowledge of protocols such as AJAX, JSON, XML-RPC, SOAP, and REST;
• Designing graphical user interfaces using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and prototyping tools;
• Implementing knowledge, information, project, and source code version management systems using wikis, blogs, rss, bugzilla, jira, trac, git, cvs, subversion and project management tools.

Management skills

• CxO-level management experience as former CTO of BackStream, a company I co-founded in 2000 (with business units sold to CTP/Novell in 2003 and to Ordina/Clockwork in 2004);
• Managing internationally dispersed development teams;
• Working with international offshore and near-shore outsource companies.