About

Welcome to my blog,

I am Bart Maes and I’m a software architect at Test-Aankoop in Belgium. I work mainly with the .NET platform and other Microsoft products.

What motivates me are all the little challenges that need to be solved in my day to day job. I like to analyze problems and break them down into small pieces, making abstractions and finding the core of the solution. Once this is done, I am satisfied and often applying the solution and finishing the job is done by someone else, while I am tackling the next problem. It kind of fits with my mathematical background.

There is a good joke about mathematicians:

An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist are staying for the night in a hotel. Fortunately for this joke, a small fire breaks out in each room.

The physicist awakes, sees the fire, makes some careful observations, and on the back of the hotel’s wine list does some quick calculations. Grabbing the fire extinguisher, he puts out the fire with one, short, well placed burst, and then crawls back into bed and goes back to sleep.

The engineer awakes, sees the fire, makes some careful observations, and on the back of the hotel’s room service list (pizza menu) does some quick calculations. Grabbing the fire extinguisher (and adding a factor of safety of 5), he puts out the fire by hosing down the entire room several times over, and then crawls into his soggy bed and goes back to sleep.

The mathematician awakes and sees the fire. He lights a match and puts it in a glass of water. Jubliant, he exclaims “A solution exists!”, and crawls into his dry bed and goes back to sleep.

My blog will probably not be any different. I hope you will find some useful information on my blog, but you’ll probably have to work out the last bits and pieces yourself… If you have questions how to do anything concrete with the things I post about, you can leave your comment and I’ll take a look if I can help you further.