This domain (boer.land) is the vanity domain of me, Bert Boerland.  I like emerging technologies and have a keen eye for business opportunities. I have a vision and am opinionated. Sometimes these two converge and this is where I am  at my best.
Making contact as well as sketching opportunities. For prospects, for team members.

And maybe for and with you.

I also co-founded a successful web agency creating innovative digital experiences based upon the open source project “Drupal” and sold this agency to a Canadian enterprise.

As a side project, I am currently kickstarting another company, a Computer-Generated Imagery animation studio using the open source “Blender” tool.

Lots of fun, never a dull moment.

So while you thought you were lost wandering the net, you might actually have found what you were looking for: a site about a nice chap that is always searching for ways to grow and learn by helping others.

So if you need a speaker, a coach or an investor, or just someone to talk to, you might have wandered into the right website after all.

IN HOBBY

The nerdism has been around me since my first Commodore 64. I was able to mix my digital hobbies with my professional live from an early age. When I was 18 years old, I wrote as a student in a national computer zine called “Amiga Magazine” back in the early nineties of the last century. I made 100 guilders per page and I couldn’t have been more proud to see my name in print in all the bookstores in the low lands.

Ever since then, I have been mixing private and business as much as I can. With my logic, doing something you are good at and get energy from, while getting paid, is the best thing. One might lose a hobby, but it sure beats losing your job.

So around 2000 I became interested in the Content Management System. The thought of publishing without the layout hardcoded to the content was interesting back then and still is the core principle of the web. I started with PHPNuke but the italian documented spaghetti code was even for a non coder like myself indigestible. I ran into drop.org, a place where some friendly people talked about the web two dot ooh and the semantic web and became active in that community. The site became an open source tool (Drupal) and I bought the domain name drupal.org and gave it to Dries. Ever since then I have been active in as many non coding ways as possible. I organised the DrupalCon Amsterdam 2005 and Barcelona 2007 as the lead and helped as a track chair in many other DrupalCon’s as well as organised the Frontend United conference in Amsterdam. I was a board member of the Drupal Association and founded the Dutch Drupal Foundation and have been a boardmember for many many years. I started the  DrupalJam events (now over 500 attendees) and have been organising them for over a decade.

Other hobbies include domotica, reading non fiction books, drawing and experimenting with natural user interfaces. Recently I switched some of my spare time towards another cool European Open Source project called Blender. Though not as active in the community, I learn as much as I can about this tool. For my hobby but for sure to help people out commercially as well.

IN Business

I always envied my parents who after the war -my father was 50 when I was born- could become whatever they wanted without having a diploma. The truth is that my kids should envy my generation. My parents couldn’t become what they wanted due to social restrictions. My mother for example had to quit her job when she became pregnant.
I however have an academic degree that I never used for my profession in a narrower sense. But when I took a job I was thrown into the deep and managed a BGP network, the core of the internet without any prior knowledge of how TCP/IP worked and maintained a firewall (a complete new concept in 1995) for a big pharma while I had never seen a UNIX system.

With coaches and the right attitude I made it and worked my way up to architecture, consulting and management.

And still, I do what gives me power. Starting new companies, learning from young people, working with cool customers.