Shane van de Vorstenbosch from OnSolution is presenting at the 2016 Australian Symposium
Find out more about him in this speaker spotlight.
Last day to register !
Registrations for Sydney have already closed.
Registrations for Melbourne closes this Tuesday, 2nd August at midnight … because we have to sleep sometime
NEWS FLASH – Shane recently joined the ADUG committee, representing the Sydney branch.
When he was considering joining he said “Are you sure you want me on the committee because I’ll be loud and Ill want to shake things up”.
We knew this, and thats why we wanted him on board. Welcome to the committee Shane.
You can meet Shane at the Symposium and have a word in his ear about your ideas for ADUG.
Dont worry, he mainly shouts at the committee. You should be relatively safe.
Shane van de Vorstenbosch is well known to all subscribers to the ADUG mailing list for his mix of on and off topic comments. With over 20 years of Delphi programming experience he understands our side of things, and with 16 years of running his own company, OnSolution, he understands marketing and user engagement. He now spends more time marketing than coding and is looking at market trends to remain relevant and profitable.
His Symposium presentation “Moving with the times” will look at user engagement in modern times. It will shift the focus from code to all aspects of engaging with users and others.
What city do you live in
Sydney
Where do you travel for Delphi related work ?
New Zealand
What does your business OnSolution do ?
“Safety” – temperature loggers (primarily for vaccine and hospitality), hospital sterilisation tracking, hand washing training
Tell us about your I.T career
My career history technical sales, technical training, technical writing, product manager, and THEN software development. By the time I was writing code again I had been focusing on users for a decade, not focusing on code techniques. Now I spend more time marketing than coding and so am once again focused on the users. Don’t ask me about code injection because I have no idea, but ask me about how to engage users and we can have a great conversation.
I had a large local catering company investigate my temperature loggers. When my key contact changed jobs and left the country the entire deal fell through. My contact, however, joined an international catering company and moved to Angola. He continued to use my product and software to monitor the supply chain into Angola and eliminated most of the supply issues that were causing them to throw out a huge amount of food or use compromised quality ingredients. As a result of his success in Angola he was promoted to their head office and the software/application was rolled out around the world. My software ended up in war torn countries and third world countries, as well as the US and UK.
How you involved in the Delphi community ?
I am regular at the Sydney ADUG meetings and in ADUG email list discussions.
What would the typical ADUG member not know about you ?
I am the author of “The Rotten Food Cookbook”, now an Amazon best seller.
I am also a keen squash player which means I am either a masochist or sadist.
How did you get introduced to computers and Delphi ?
I got started on an Apple ][ in 1986 in high school. Self-taught programming and hacking games before the internet made it easy.
I learnt Pascal at uni. Programmed in Borland Pascal (remember “Owl”?) and moved to Delphi in 1998 for a large project.
In 1998 I sat down with Delphi and Visual Studio for a day. By the end of the day I was rolling out Delphi apps while still struggling to do the fundamentals in Visual Studio. It was a no brainer decision back then.
What interesting technology challenges have you tackled ?
How to write software that is used by people who don’t know what the “Start” button is, what a scroll bar is, or how to close the program and they will only use your program once a month for 5 minutes or at the other extreme now use your software as a central part of their daily routine.
What Delphi projects are you working on now ?
Temperature logging software is my businesses cash cow.
Sterilisation tracking is a rising star.
New temperature logging is in development.
My “dabbling” area is BLE and IoT. That’s where our biggest advantage currently lies.
Ive heard rumours of some interesting claims to fame. Tell us about them
* Best New Product at Fine Food for temperature logging.
* Guest speaker for food safety related issues at University of Western Sydney and at food safety summits.
* Amazon best seller for “The Rotten Food Cookbook” but it was a real cookbook (unlike Daniele Teti’s cookbook)
* My fame is outside the IT world, but then my customers are outside the IT world. My talk is on how to engage with the outside world!
What can people learn from your Symposium presentation ?
My topic is about engaging the user both within your app and outside your app. Software is no longer about just providing a solution, but now integrating into their lifestyle. Then there are the issues around using social media to engage users. By the end of this talk there will be some people walking out with new software ideas, ideas on how to “go mobile”, simple ways to bring existing users into your “community”, and ways to find new customers. This is the “double you income” talk.
You can meet Shane at the 2016 Symposium
Registrations for Sydney have already closed.
Registration for Melbourne closes this Tuesday, 2nd August
https://www.adug.org.au/
HUGE PRIZE DRAW $27,000+
Everyone wins. Recently upgraded from “probably” to “definately“.
Thanks to the many Symposium prize donors, every pre-registered attendee is guaranteed to go home with a prize
Interview by Scott Hollows
2016 Symposium Wrangler and ADUG Vice President