About the name
Back in 2007, I was very interested in running. I had finished my assistant running coach course, I was preparing for the running coach one, and reading a lot of books on running mechanics and physiology. One of those books was “Running: Biomechanics and Exercise Physiology in Practice” (2005) by Frans Bosch and Ronald Klomp. In this book, they made a case for reactive running. Reactivity refers to the amount of energy that is reused for the purpose of performing useful work, in this case, running. I also found it symbolic of what I was doing, reusing the energy I spent working for various consultancy agencies for the start of my freelance career. Hence the name REactivity.
Pre 2007: Software consultant
I started my career as a COBOL programmer for Ordina Finance. This was 1996, a couple of years before Y2K, so programmers were in high demand. I learned a lot in those early years working on large and business-critical software systems. With no access to stack overflow and no copilots, most of what you learned came from experienced programmers you worked with. This was also the time of waterfall development with its flow of Information Analysis – Functional design – Technical design – programming – (manual) testing – implementation. Contrary to the current idea that waterfall projects all failed, most of them were successful as most of the project managers had started as programmers and knew how to make their projects a success. Most companies still had a strict division between IT and business and within IT between development, support, and operations.
They were also the heydays of large-scale mainframe development, even the mainframe-oriented businesses started moving to client-server applications (where servers would often still be the mainframe) and web development.
2007-2009: Project Management
My first year as a freelancer I spent as a project manager.
