About me
Hi, I’m Pieter Vogelaar. It all began when I was 13 that web development got my interest. The first websites were build with Microsoft Frontpage and all pages were static HTML. For the graphical aspects of the website I used Adobe Photoshop.
At the age of 17 I started an email marketing company with a friend of mine. His main responsibility was the business side and mine the technical side. From that moment on I started to build dynamic web applications with databases and everything. Frontpage was ofcourse already kicked out the door, because it’s so much better to write your HTML and CSS code by hand. The programming was done in an IDE (Interactive Development Environment) like Netbeans. After two years we extended the company with an affiliate network.
The development of the web application gained me a lot of practical experience. The connections I made through the company let to more and more web development contracts. All the development hours were spent besides school, so in the evening hours and weekends. Ofcourse not all of my free time was spent on it, I do have a social life.. seriously! 
Not only building and maintaining the web application was my responsibility, but also the installation and maintenance of the servers. This way I became more and more familiar with Linux.
In 2007 I graduated for my “HBO Informatica (Information Technology)” education. That was also the year I decided to step out of the affiliate marketing company and become a full time freelancer. Look for all the jobs / contracts I have done at my portfolio.
Since I started with professional web development, my focus has always been on open source techniques. It’s amazing how many quality open source projects are available on the internet. The progamming language I started with and still use is PHP. I always felt great love for this language and often used this in combination with a MySQL database. Besides backend programming with PHP and databases, I can also do frontend programming with JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, etc.) and implementing designs from Adobe Photoshop into CSS and HTML.
When PHP5 came out, a lot of great object oriented open source PHP frameworks were built. If you still develop applications nowadays in plain PHP without a framework, you are 9 out of 10 times a complete idiot. With the large amount of frameworks that were offered, I had to focus and made a choise for Drupal to build content websites and Symfony to build web applications. Later on I switched from Symfony to Zend Framework and used Doctrine 2 as ORM to communicate in an object oriented way with the database.
The programming language PHP can be used object oriented, but also as a simple script. That’s why a lot of programmers choose PHP to easily write some code. But often they are are not really professionals. To distinguish yourself as a professional and being able to easily show that you have decent knowledge of PHP, the Zend company introduced the “Zend PHP Certificate”. As of August 2009 I’m the proud owner of the “Zend PHP 5 Certificate” and may call myself “Zend Certified Engineer”! In November 2011 I also became a “Zend Framework Certified Engineer” by passing the Zend Framework certification exam.
