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Bio: Arie Rens 20-Feb-2002 -- Susan Pichotta He's used Clarion to write software for the European Space Agency. His company recently won a Dutch software competition (see the thread titled "Clarion wins in Dutch RADrace" in the softvelocity.products.c55ee newsgroup). He's a Clarion Distributor. And he's worked as a farmhand, growing... tulips, among other things. Don't miss this week's bio about another interesting Clarionite. Who do you work for? Currently I work for RADventure. I own this company together with my 3 co-directors: 
left to right: Erik Pepping, Peter Rens, André van der Weijden and Arie RensWhat do you like best about what you do now? I have been able to make my hobby my work, and have not been bored yet. What has been one of your biggest challenges in using Clarion? 
Converting a major project for the European Space Agency (similar to NASA) from CPD 2.110 to Clarion for Windows,
while maintaining the general look & feel, and file compatibility (that is why it is still using the Clarion Data
file format).Working with the space agency software: Erik Pepping, Arie Rens, Find Heede and Sonja de Jager (the last 2 are non-RADventure people) What has been one of your biggest challenges in business? The merger of our previous company, Advantage Software, with another company, Extensie, to form RADventure. There are so many things that needed attention, but we also had to do 'business as usual' as far as our customers were concerned. This was one of the major reasons why I had to become less active in the newsgroups than I used to. 'The dust has settled down' now, and the new company is shaping up nicely. Luckily, we had a lot of support from our employees. 
Our company celebrating "Sinterklaas" (December 5th), a traditional Dutch party
where (as we do it) each participant makes a surprise gift/package for one other participant together with
a (usually) funny rime about what has happened to the colleague in the recent past. It is supposed to be a
secret who made the gift, but usually it doesn't take long to guess. Small children are made to believe the
gifts come from Sinterklaas (St.Nicolas), which is pronounced as "Santa Claus".Do you use any computer languages besides Clarion? Occasionally assembly, C, C++, Modula. Mainly when I encounter some source libraries in these languages and I find it too much hassle to convert them to Clarion. I used to use other languages in the past (Pascal, BASIC, FORTH, LISP among others). Computer languages are a bit like natural languages in this aspect: when you don't write them any more on a regular basis, you can usually still read and understand the major part of it, but when you have to write something again you are often searching for the right words/statements to use. My first major (hobby) software project was writing a 8080 assembler in 8080 assembly for our homecomputer (a DAI: 2MHz 8080 processor, 48Kb RAM (incl. video RAM), 24Kb ROM (using a technique called bank-switching), digital cassette tape as external memory). Because the external memory access was slow everything needed to be done in-memory, so we had to squeeze the entire sourcecode, objectcode and machinecode of the assembler together in the available RAM. Ahhh, those were the days when it was worthwhile to spend some time at saving a byte here and there... <g> 
When did you start using Clarion?We started to use Clarion in summer 1988 because we needed to develop 20 (very) small business applications without runtime licences. Clarion did the job very well, and started to grow on us. When we found that there was no local support or distributor yet, we decided to do this ourselves. As I remember we were the second international distributor for Clarion Software (Finland was earlier). The first Clarion version we used was Professional Developer 2.001. Later I obtained a Clarion 1.113(?) version, just to see what it used to be like. One of the former offices of Advantage Software, in the centre of Amsterdam. We used to have offices in other nice places as well, like a former church, but I don't have scannable pictures of those. What's the coolest project(s) you've worked on using Clarion? When you talk about 'cool' these are the tools we are developing in RADventure (the first set has just been released through the ClarionShop). My involvement is currently mainly "they make'em, I (try to) break'em", a.k.a. testing. In the early phases of a project it is sometimes like shooting fish in a barrel, but later you have to go to extremes in order to break the programme, which makes it even more fun. I have also been involved in the alpha/beta testing of some Clarion versions (which versions is under NDA), and after all those years I still like the work I'm doing for ESA. Have you done anything for a living other than software development? I have been trained as an auditor for VAT taxes, and have actually done a number of audits at the time. When the audit department became aware of my computer hobby, however, they decided I would be much more valuable for them developing office automation applications. When I was a schoolboy/student I used to work as a farmhand, soon foreman, on a farm growing flowers (Tulip, Daffodil, Crocus, Freesia (I loved those), Lily, Iris, etc). Hard, rewarding work which kept me in a great physical shape. Apart from software development I also do a part of the management in our company (although the day-to-day management is done by our co-directors), consultancy, counseling, hardware and network maintenance, support and all other kind of stuff that needs to be done. I like to delegate if possible, but things can't always wait. "Sometimes you don't do things because they are fun, or interesting, but because they need to be done." What are your hobbies/what do you like to do when you're not using Clarion? I used to read a lot of science fiction / fantasy (Jack Vance a/o). One of the walls in our living room is covered with books, many multiple row. I still like it, but seem to have less time for it nowadays. Married, children, grandchildren, other close family 
you want to mention?I'm single. I currently share a household with my twin brother Peter, who is also co-owner of our company. We used this picture for an ad campaign, "Perfect Harmony", some years ago. Where were you born? In Burgerbrug, the Netherlands (est. population 400). For those interested in geography, that is about in the middle of the north-west peninsula of the Netherlands. Where do you live now? Depends on what you mean by 'where you live'. I spend most of the time I'm awake at the office. <g> In the more traditional way, however, currently I live in Amsterdam. We own a nice house (anno 1928) which basically consists of 2 regular houses on top of each other, each with 2 floors. The house at the bottom is used by our tenants, the house at the top is used by us. Within a few months, however, we intend to move to Maarssen, where our office is located, to a house (anno 1989) where we will have no tenants 
any more, with a private parking space (something we missed in Amsterdam). Our new house in Maarssen. This is not all ours <g>. Our house is in the middle, from the pillar at the left till the middle of the stone wall next to it. A tendency is to build deep, small houses rather than wide, shallow houses because that way you need less street/ infrastructure per house. Editor's note: To see floor plans of Arie's homes, click here.... but be warned that the page you're calling contains almost half a meg of images. :) What's interesting about where you live? Well, it _is_ AMSTERDAM. Do I need to say more? <g> Have you lived any other interesting places? Whenever I get back to our ancestoral ranch and sit outside on a nice summer evening, and can look all the way to the horizon, I like it very much. When I remember though how tough it could be to live there in the wintertime, I do appreciate the comfort of where I live now. Which person, from past or present, do you most admire and why? I know a lot of people who have qualities I like (and others I tolerate), but it would be impossible to rank them. How do you compare e.g. someone who is content with the life he lives (a quality I admire), even though it is on a very low income, with someone who is technically brilliant (also a quality I admire), but makes a mess of his personal life? I like to think I take the people as they are. 
What is your favorite food?I like to eat bread. Other things I like are traditional Dutch dishes, like stampot, boerenkool, hutspot, groene en grauwe erwten. I don't mind trying other kinds of food, as long as it is 'mild' (not spicy). What is your favorite drink? Apple juice or chocolate milk (not at the same time). What is your favorite type of music? 
Depends on what I'm doing. When I'm doing hard physical labour, I like popmusic with a heavy rhythmic beat, like
some numbers of (Ike &) Tina Turner. When I drive my car, I like songs with clear lyrics. When I'm need my
attention for complicated software or business problems, my favorite music is no music at all.If Clarion never existed, what do you think you would be doing at this time? I guess programming low-level utilities in a suitable language (Modula-2, likely), and/or software testing. Anything else you want to mention? As I mentioned, the dust has settled down after the merger of our companies, and now we are picking up steam again with new projects and new products. We just won the RAD race (pun intended), a prestigious award in our territory for application development. This was, apart from my colleagues who participated, because of the toolset they used. Clarion, of course, but also some additional classes and templates which were developed within our company and which made it possible to do almost everything without coding (only about 300 lines of embedded code in a complex application). We have already released one of those tools (the RADventure Oracle Dictionary tools) and there are more in the pipeline. So if anyone else would like to speed up their application development, these tools are available at www.clarionshop.com 
The ranch where I grew up (partly anno 1675?). Yes, that is an original Dutch windmill
in the background (still functional), and when I was young I often used to walk on wooden shoes.
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