About Albert Visser
I'm Dutch, born in 1956, finished school (also called "gymnasium") but couldn't find a suitable higher education. I tried psychology, drama college ("toneelschool") and drama teaching school but none or them fit. After that and working in temp jobs, in around 1984 I thought I had better make some sort of career choice.
Since I didn't want to go into accounting, I chose IT (it wasn't called that then, the Dutch term translates as 'automation', which was a pretty accurate description at the time since a lot of work was still done by hand, pen, paper and letter). I had no idea what I was getting myself into but it turned out to be an enjoyable experience, more so when I could actually get to work as a mainframe COBOL programmer.
It wasn't all COBOL, there was also a kind of scripting language available that could be used to build small applications to automate tasks and I got quite proficient in that too.
Over 10 years ago - in 2001/2002 I think -, after some occasional dabbling with C, Java and less occasional tinkering with various flavours of BASIC and a funny language called Euphoria, I ran into Python and my soul got kinda sold.
I've been writing in Python A LOT! It's fun. What COBOL and Python have in common is that they put a lot of emphasis on - and make it possible to be - writing readable code.
Still, only relatively recently I got the courage to go public with some of my stuff.