Erik van der Tier

Artist, Blogger, Consultant, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Global soul, Idea generator, Parent, Technologist

Husband, father of two boys, searcher for happiness, reader, street surfer, judoka, traveler, visualiser, automator, photographer, optimiser of future freedom and life long Nerd. Foundations I had my first experience with computers (at the age of 7 or 8) when my parents decided to sell our VCR (an early Betamax) in order to buy our first home computer: a Philips P2000T). There was hardly any (commercial) software available for this computer, but there was a very active user community that regularly released tapes with selections of applications. This meant that the best way to do interesting things with this computer was to learn programming (mostly Basic) and make those things yourself. Thus began my ‘Nerdhood’. ICT Product Development/Consultancy In my ICT career, I have been involved in the development of HP’s ProductXpress product suite. My work on this product suite started as the ‘mental father’. Since then I have been involved in every stage of the development of these products from original vision, ‘internal concept sales’, prototyping, development, productizing, consultancy and sales. I continue to build upon my in-depth knowledge of both ProductXpress as a product suite and the concepts of financial product modeling in ProductXpress in my role as consultant for Riskco. Married with Kids On the 7th of June, 2002, I married Ankie Vermeulen. We had already been happily together for many years before then. We did a lot of traveling and generally enjoyed the good things in life. In 2006 and 2008 our lives were turned up-side-down by the completion of our little familie by the arrival of our two kids: Milo and Devin. We still try to travel as often as our busier lives allow, though we tend to stay within Europe these days. Especially the Scottish Highlands have become our favourite place to go to for our vacations. Career interlude and 'soul search': Media & Visual Effects After 10-11 years of experience in developing software products and architectures, I decided to broaden my focus into my long time passion of visual effects. After a two year period of personal development and study in this field, I started my own vfx-company: Dutch Effects Factory. Since then, I have continued my vfx education next to doing diverse projects spanning compositing and supervision work on films, museum productions, promo’s, etc. Later I started focussing foremost on 3D visual effects using Side FX’s Houdini, building 3D fx tools that can be used by clients and/or for clients. Full circle: back to ICT After about 6 years working as an independent VFX artist, I have gone full circle and am refocussing on ITC.

Software Architecture and Design, Trainer/coach of professionals, Trainer/Training Development, vfx