More About Me

Hi All,

So if you haven't already guessed, my name is Bastiaan Olij and this is my little blog on the web.

I've ran my own website for years on end but got tired of maintaining my own site while all I was doing was writing about some of my play things in programming so a couple of years ago I decided to dump it all and simply use Blogger.

If you've browsed around my site already you already know I like programming. It will come to no surprise I also work in the field:)

Born in the late 70ies and hailing originally from the Netherlands I was lucky enough to have a father who worked in IT and probably ended up the only kid in town with ready access to computers. At the age of 6 I could often be found behind the keyboard of my fathers TRS-80 playing all sorts of games. By the age of 10 I was working my way through various programming books dreaming I would one day write games.

While I would eventually end up learning Basic, Pascal, C and a basic understanding of Assembly (Borland, I will be for ever in your debt) and now working on a 286 by my mid teens it wasn't until I was allowed to raise my parents phone bill and use a modem to connect to the HCC (the dutch Home Computer Club) bulletin board systems and through it FidoNet that I would get into contact with other kids who were trying to do the same and learned the gift of giving as many of them would freely donate code snip-its or even upload full tutorials to these bulletin board systems.

I also need to give another shout out to my dad and his subscription to Dr Dobbs Journal Michael Abrash's series on graphics programming that taught me invaluable things.

Things however took a completely new direction during this time as I was introduced to this thing called the Demo Scene. Here were a group of teenage programmers, musicians and artists who for no other reason then having fun were creating elaborate graphical demonstrations to show off their skills all with regular competition all over Europa. The first "demo" I ever saw was MegaDemo by SpacePigs but it wasn't until Second Reality came out in 1992 I knew this is something I wanted to be involved with.

Eventually I would join a joke group called "The KiP Brigade" and we did actually make some nice stuff. We're most remembered for a series of Disk Magazines (magazines digitally distributed on floppy disks and BBSs prior to the internet becoming popular) called Cheeze and I had my moment of fame together with Mark Jongerman when we started a popular bus service to many competitions.

By the time we actually got good, we all had finished schools and gonne off to work, and slowly all this went onto the back burner. While a number of my friends would eventually go on to make games, some even ending up at renowned gaming houses (and a couple even founding them) I went into business software.

I ended up getting a job at a company called FIQAS building billings software for the telecom industry. This introduced me to a, not so well know, language called Omnis and it is a language I have come to love and become a big advocate for attending many events, writing lots of tutorials for, becoming very active in the international user group and being a general pain in the ass for the people who developed it.

Eventually I met my now wife Lily who hails from Hong Kong and moved to the Netherlands but she never really felt at home there. After our daughter was born we made the difficult decision that it was time to change scenery before Linsey got to an age that would be to upsetting.

The choice was made easy when an New Zealand born gentleman offered me the lead development role at a little company called Instinct Systems housed in Australia as his business partner had made his wish to retire clear.

I never forgot my roots though, I still dabble in graphics programming, I'm still involved with games but from the sidelines but much of what I write on this blog is rooted in what is still my favorite hobby.