uProfile September 2019: Arnold Visser

Say hello to Arnold 🙌

Meet this month's uProfile, Arnold Visser 🎉 Arnold is the definition of an active and engaged community member. Not only does he elevate the Umbraco Dutch Festival year after year and bring a piece of himself each time he attends Codegarden, but he also made an awesome Google Maps Umbraco Package. What keeps this friendly face coming back to Umbraco for more? Let Arnold tell you:

Company name: Axendo and Dutch Umbraco User Group (DUUG)

Job role: New business developer and Umbraco specialist at Axendo and a volunteering board member of DUUG

● Country: The Netherlands

For how long have you been working with Umbraco?

I have actively been working with Umbraco since the first half of 2006 (yes!) and never looked back!

Favorite Umbraco moment?

My favorite Umbraco moment is attending my first Codegarden back in 2010.

It had a big impact on both my personal and professional life. Not just because of all the great things I learned, the information that got exchanged, and the Bingo craziness, but also because I had the chance to meet many people from the community.

Most of them are still around and now we get to catch up and talk about our family life when we meet at Codegarden 😉

What's also fun is the stickering of my car in the last few years for the road trip to Codegarden.

What in your Umbraco career are you most proud of?

Taking the Dutch Umbraco User Group and the Dutch Umbraco Festival (DUUGfest) to a whole new level in the last couple of years.

Last year’s (2018) DUUGfest was already the icing on the cake, but this year will set even higher standards for the Dutch Umbraco community.

What about Umbraco keeps you coming back for more?

There is no system that compares to the ease-of-use that Umbraco offers to developers and content-editors. I am worried though that after so many years of using Umbraco, I might have become somewhat of an Umbraco addict instead of a sensible user 😉

What are you currently working on?

Currently, we are working on various bigger Umbraco projects for clients, some on V7, but most of them on Umbraco 8.

The projects’ specifics include a Vue.js front-end for filtering, an extensive Umbraco Forms integration and, because it was not yet available and we were in need of a solution, a Google Maps for Umbraco package, which I have created and made available to the community.

This package is a property editor that gives editors a Google Map to place a marker on. It handles the geolocation when you place a marker and even saves the zoom level and type of map chosen by the editor.

I am also dedicating a lot of my time to organizing the next Dutch Umbraco Festival, which will take place on the 11th of October! I'm talking with Umbraco Agencies in the Netherlands about sponsorships, discussing the talks and speakers with fellow DUUG board members Martijn Maris and Henk Boelman and making sure the website and our social channels get some outings and are up-to-date.

If you are Dutch, or close to the Netherlands and interested in Umbraco, get all the information and your tickets at https://www.duugfest.nl/

What are your top 3 best tips for an Umbraco newbie?

Umbraco is very versatile so just give it a try. You might fail, but don’t hesitate to reach out to the Umbraco Community and they will help you out. The Our.Umbraco community and the Umbraco Community on Slack are filled with people who love to help!
Attend a local meetup to meet fellow Umbraco-enthusiasts. A lot of meetups are organized on meetup.com and Umbraco HQ even supports a lot of them!
Follow #Umbraco on twitter. There is a lot of activity around Umbraco all day long and you get to know a lot of people in the community.

Any aspirations for your future?

I would love to make DUUGfest a multi-day event and attract a bigger and more diverse audience. One example could be potential Umbraco users who are not sure if Umbraco is the right choice for them yet.

This way, the festival becomes an opportunity for the hard-core Umbracians to share their love and passion with the newcomers who might still be in doubt.

Also, I would love to do more with package creation. I just released “Our.Umbraco.GMaps” and I look forward to creating more.

What video game are you playing now?

I am a big fan of ‘everything’ Nintendo.

I even drink out of a Zelda Shield mug at work. I mostly play on the Nintendo Switch. I keep coming back to Zelda Breath of the Wild and somewhat of a hidden gem is Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle!

Tell us something unexpected about yourself?

People will say I am a very enthusiastic and quite busy person who talks a lot, but often in the evening, when the kids are in bed, I love to sit on the couch with my wife and just watch a movie and do nothing.

Well… when I’m not doing something Umbraco related, gaming or researching recipes for meals to make with my Big Green Egg BBQ that is 😉

What’s your most memorable meal?

My most memorable meal was not memorable because of how great it was, but how bad it smelled and tasted.

It’s even Umbraco related actually.

I was invited to Iceland by the wonderful team of Vettvangur (now Umbraco Gold Partner!) and spent a few days with their team on Umbraco, but also on Iceland itself. They let me taste “Hákarl” which is Fermented shark.

I can take pride in the fact that I did not vomit…

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A massive H5YR to Arnold for sharing a little bit about himself 🙌! If you’d like to connect with Arnold, you can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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