If I had a "mission statement", it would say something vague like:
Building software systems to facilitate inter-personal communication and information exchange.
Basically I'm interested in the technical aspects of using computers as a communications tool. That includes technologies like:
The major challenge with those technologies continues to be the design of services that are robust, secure, and can scale to large numbers of users. This requires a deep understanding of technology on all levels, and a practical skill set to develop the various aspects of a system.
In practice that translates into things like:
As the Internet industry matures, there is an ever-increasing stream of new technologies and implementations that need to evaluated and balanced with the needs of simplicity, robustness, and cost-effectiveness. Of particular appeal to me is the increasing acceptance of open source development models that have the potential of providing widely used, high-quality software components.
Martijn Koster was born in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, on 19 April 1970. From 1982 to 1988 he attended Pre-university grammar school at "Het Gemeentelijk Gymnasium" in Hilversum.
He went on to study Computer Science at The University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a 2.1 BSc. Hons. Degree in 1991. During his course he received the Ford Motor Company prize for his role in the 2nd year group project.
Having obtained his degree, he returned to The Netherlands in to perform his National Service in the Dutch Army. He was admitted as a ROAG reserve officer, and received the ROAG prize for best results. After basic training he was stationed at SHAPE Technical Centre (The research lab of NATO's European HQ, now called NATO C3 Agency), to develop computer supported co-operative work systems for operations research. He left STC with the title of scientist, and the rank of 2nd lieutenant (since promoted to 1st lieutenant).
In 1992 Martijn returned to the United Kingdom, to work for NEXOR on electronic messaging and directory services. There he was responsible for the design, implementation and maintenance of PC-DUA, an X.500 LDAP user agent for MS-Windows written in C++. In addition he worked on a number of smaller projects. He also got married :-)
He also developed a keen interest in The World-Wide Web and developed many public services for NEXOR's World-Wide Web server, using Perl 5 on UNIX (see details). These include ArchiePlex, an Archie gateway, CUSI, a general Internet Search Interface, an interface to the Macintosh Archive at the University of Michigan, ALIWEB, a resource discovery tool, and interfaces to the RFC/Internet Drafts documents of the IETF. These services received positive reviews and mentions in a wide variety of electronic and printed sources. Martijn also presented papers at conferences (including the First World-Wide Web Conference at CERN) and published in research journals on resource discovery.
In October 1995 Martijn left NEXOR and joined WebCrawler, then operated by America Online, in California. There he worked on the Web services in general, and the WebCrawler server software (based on Apache in particular).
In April 1997 Martijn returned once again to the United Kingdom, while WebCrawler was acquired by Excite Inc. Martijn continued to work for Excite as an international consultant, initially on closer integration of WebCrawler and Excite technologies.
Between 1998 and 2001 Martijn worked on Excite Mail (which became Excite Inbox), Excite's web-based free email service. As software architect he worked with a small team that initially implemented a perl-based service (using Software.com's InterMail backend technology) and managed the migration of users from the previous third party service. This was followed by a complete Java-based rewrite that has improved usability and interoperability, and is fully internationalised to support other countries, including Japan. Later Martijn moved into a broader architecture role in Excite, improving several parts of Excite's underlying software system infrastructure.
Since 2002 Martijn has been working as software architect for Danger, Inc, focusing mainly on the browser service backend infrastructure to support the Hiptop mobile devices.
A resume in PDF format is available upon request.