Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Mouse & The Elephant

In 1995 I remember seeing a documentary where they interviewed Bill Gates. He was asked if he was fearing competition from other big software companies. His answer was that he didn't fear any of the big companies around. He said that the threat to a big company is not in the other big companies, but in the smaller companies slowly undermining the foundations of the business that his big company was built upon. He pointed out the window at the lawn down below and said something like "Up from...

Famous Failures

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OpenIdea: TwitterCounter.com

During the Kings of Code event two weeks ago I was talking about Twitter with someone. He mentioned how many followers he had and I mentioned my number of followers. He was impressed with my number of followers and I felt a moment of pride. Then I suggested that this number might become significant one day as it says as much about someone as pageviews or RSS feeds. If I come to a blog and see they have 10.000 rss feed subscribers I take their opinion more serious than if they have 10 feed...

Kill your darlings…

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on March 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn't finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a...

How do you paint a white rabbit?

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on April 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. On Sunday I was visiting my parents house to celebrate Easter Day. As we drove there we noticed a perfect white rabbit sitting by the side of the road. I stopped to show it to our children and told them it must have been the Easter bunny. My parents hid painted real eggs and...

Shower Interview

I did an interview for a Dutch student association while taking a shower. Yeah, that is not a typo. Check out the result (Interview in Dutch, sorry) here: This frame shows Tessa leading the interviewer to our...