My name is Richard Fresow. Born and raised in Maastricht, the most beautiful town of the Netherlands. I work as a software engineer at Statistic Netherlands (in Dutch: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek). Now I work there as an employee, prior I have worked there several times as contractor via my former employer QNH. For my complete career see my LinkedIn profile.

My first contact with computers was somewhere in 1980 during a visit with my parents at friends of them. There son owned an Apple II. Shortly after that I started an education in the IT. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. This computer used a standard television as monitor and programs had to be saved and loaded to and from a compact cassette.

I think about a year later my father bought an Apple II. My father had an one person administration office and used this computer for the financial administrations of his clients. The use of the Apple saved him a lot of time! In later years the Apple was replaced with newer models and at last a ‘normal’ PC. The Apple had 2 5¼-inch floppy drives and a 132 character wide matrix printer.

My first job, after military service, was at the PTT. That was the Dutch state post and telephone company. I worked at the telephony branch as computer operator. Not much later I started as programmer at Bates Cepro. From than on I had several job as programmer in several firms. In the period 2000-2016 I worked for IT companies who contracted my to their customers.

I started my career as COBOL programmer and via C, Objective C (NeXTSTEP) and VBA/VB6 to .NET development. In my current job I am together with my colleagues responsible for the maintenance of all the custom software our company is using. These are mostly complex and inter dependent systems.