Patrick Broens

Background

About Patrick Broens

I'm born in 1970, owning my own company (Sole Proprietorship) in Tilburg, The Netherlands. I started programming on a Sinclair ZX80 computer, continued this on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and switched from Commodore to MSX and even an Osborne 1 machine. Most of my work then were games. I was one of the first on the Internet in the Netherlands when it became available to the public and therefore think I'm a pioneer. When the Internet became available for the public, I published my first personal website and made the finals in a webdesign contest which then existed. After my study Mechanical Engineering and doing some work in logistics, I decided to go to the Artschool. Although the emphasis went more to design, I never stopped programming, For more then a decade ago this was, yes dear readers, ASP and Perl. Working for a company in Utrecht, I discovered CMS systems like the commercial RedDot. After switching jobs, there was a difficult choice: start programming my own CMS or search for one that was quite similar to the ones I was used to work with. I decided to go for the first option. After a crash of my computer with lots of smoke and fire, after three months of programming, I suddenly discovered "friendly ghost" Kasper Skårhøj's work and was glad someone else had the same thought. All the websites I've made since are done in TYPO3. This was in At the first TYPO3 Dutch/Flemmish User Group day in 2005 I met other people from the community, for the first time. Especially Ben van 't Ende has encouraged me to do more in the TYPO3 community. I also became a TYPO3 core team member at the same year.