Speaker - Arjen Lentz

Arjen was born in Amsterdam, but now lives near Brisbane ("Meanjin") on Australia's East Coast with his wife Claire (the kids have flown the coop). In another handful of years, he'll have lived in Australia as long as he was in The Netherlands. Why did he move in the first place, you ask? Well, the subtropical climate, the space, and fewer "tall poppy" problems. Arjen started with programming in a heavily air-conditioned basement room of a local youth club, on a PDP-8/VT78 terminal with 8" floppies (BASIC and assembly), but soon he managed to get hold of an Acorn BBC/B, featuring a 6502 CPU running at a whopping 2 MHz. 32 KB RAM, permanent storage via cassette tape... Arjen has worked in the fields of programming (mostly C), databases (at MySQL he wrote part of the manual, and did some other stuff), training, consulting, and most recently information "cyber!" security. Along the way has also run his own company, made a lot of mistakes, and learnt many things.