Hello! My name is Meinte. I lead teams, develop software and help steer production in the right direction.

Greenwheels is the largest carsharing corporation in the Netherlands and also operates in Germany. The company required a new booking platform and self service portal. These applications were written from the ground up using a typical React technology stack.

The existing app was a tradional monolith written in Java and JSP and was to be split up into a restful API, accessible through a single identity server and consumed by server-side rendered front end pages written in React and Redux.

The initial focus was on the self service portal, aptly called 'My Greenwheels'. It was less business critical than the booking app and it was a good proving ground before continuing on the booking application itself.

Major technical challenges consisted of Server Side Rendering(SSR), Single Sign On (SSO) and Continuous Deployments.

My main contribution consists of writing large parts of the codebase, leading the team and onboarding and supporting fellow team members.

Read the case study on info.nl

In Gladstone an LNG plant is being built which converts coal seam gas to liquid natural gas. It's never been done before and QGC needs a set of e-learning modules which will explain the overall functionality to the engineers who will be running the plant.

It is an enormous task, 19 separate modules are to be built and delivery is necessary well before the construction of the plant is finalized, which gives us a total of 4 months.

Liquid Interactive asks me to lead the project, not only to lead the team but to lead the technical solution as well. I have done several large e-learning projects in the past, but the time constraint is daunting.

By keeping the core team as small as possible, with short lines of communication and having the client as a real part of the production team we were very successful.

The project was delivered on time with modules that are of outstanding quality of which I am extremely proud. The team at Liquid Interactive delivered tremendously. If you want to know more, Liquid Interactive wrote an extensive case study which you can read on their website.

Read the case study on liquidinteractive.com.au

Before this project started, Andrew from Liquid Interactive sought my advice on whether a multiplayer game was possible, playable in a browser, with a production budget that included 5 weeks of development time. I told him he was nuts.

Weeks later, Andrew invites me to a meeting with Mauricio and see what’s possible. Mauricio represents Macquarie University as the client. He is very enthusiastic and the idea itself is great. We make changes, we discuss ideas and we realise we need a prototype. Not a prototype that needs to be developed itself, but one that takes advantage of existing tools to illustrate the core objective.

The prototype is necessary to see how people would interact with each other and how they would respond to the core mechanics of the game; the stuff that actually matters! The result was very encouraging and interactions were hilarious.

The power balance in the game is deliberately skewed to present a situation where some players are put at a distinct disadvantage whilst others are given a superior advantage. All of this happens without any of the players actually knowing about it. This results in overconfident players trading away their monopoly and disadvantaged player using their wit and charm to win the game against all odds.

For this project I have written all the code, both front and backend. Besides that I was responsible for writing up the specifications and creating the wireframes to easily share and discuss our perspective of the user experience to the client. These wireframes were later used to create the final design of the game.

This game ended up winning an iAward in New South Wales for education. To learn more about this game you can either watch the instructional video from the university itself, or read the extensive case study on the website of Liquid Interactive.

Watch the video on YouTube
Read the case study on liquidinteractive.com.au

Back in Amsterdam, Virtual Fairground is given the task to build the front end to a realistic simulation business game. The main gaming interface is to be built and the simulation state itself needs to be rendered on a globe which represents the separate markets as countries.

The globe needs to represent the world and markets that the player interacts with. Any decision the player makes will result in countries increasing trade, or other countries losing revenue and becoming unstable. Those changes in state need to be displayed real-time in 3D, playable in the browser. This game was created in 2009 and another requirement was for the game to perform well on a Pentium 4 laptop.

That is a performance treshold which is very ambitious. The game needs to perform good on a slow machine but still look great on a faster machine. A strategy is implemented which enables or disabled features based on how well the game is performing. Certain animations would be turned on or off, lower resolution textures would be used, and certain buildings not shown.

For this game I was in charge of programming the code that renders the globe on the screen. I made prototypes and did the final coding of visualisations such as weather-systems, logistics and civilizations, which were all to be displayed on that globe. I made sure the rendering of models, textures and animations would perform smoothly even on slower machines.

The game was a lot of fun to work with and a real solid example of what the browser is capable of even on a low performance machine.

Watch the video on YouTube