The Dutch rank #1 in the world in English-as-a-foreign-language proficiency, and they have been ranking #1 consistently every year for many years now, according to yearly reports by the Education First (EF) organization. (Wikipedia.)

I can attest that at least in the Randstad area, (where half the population of the country lives,) almost everyone speaks English, and many do so very fluently.

Nonetheless, there are certain mistakes that the Dutch are somewhat prone to make in English, mostly due to interference from peculiarities of the Dutch language. When this happens, it is called Dutchlish or Dunglish. The phenomenon is acknowledged by the Dutch, who have their own word for it: Steenkolenengels, which literally means coal-English.

Here is a long list of examples of Steenkolenengels that I have compiled over the course of several years of living in The Netherlands.

Abstract

A new method for Automated Software Testing is presented as an alternative to Unit Testing. The new method retains the benefit of Unit Testing, which is Defect Localization, but eliminates white-box testing and mocking, thus greatly lessening the effort of writing and maintaining tests.

This was written on 2021-11-26 but it is retro-dated so as to not appear among my recent posts, and thus avoid embarrassing certain unnamed entities. It is written in past tense even though a few paragraphs down the page it begins describing my current experience, because in the near future I intend this to become my past experience.

In 2015 I decided to leave Greece and its destroyed economy, and to go live and work elsewhere in Europe. I started an international job search, and within a couple of months I had a few offers to choose from. I picked the one from a company called Topdesk, in the nice little university town of Delft, in The Netherlands, mainly because of tax benefits available to expats in that country, but also, and in no small part, because The Netherlands has the reputation of being one of the most foreigner-friendly countries in Europe. The Netherlands achieves this reputation in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that the Dutch rank number one in the world (1) in English-as-a-foreign language proficiency, making it possible to live in The Netherlands without ever having to learn Dutch.

(Useful pre-reading: About these papers)

This assumes that you have previously established a wi-fi connection, so windows has created what it calls a "profile".

In short, the commands are:

netsh wlan connect ssid=<ssid> name=<name>

and

netsh wlan disconnect

To obtain ssid and name, use:

netsh wlan show profile

This should display all existing profile names, and by default, the <name> is the same as the <ssid>.

Things can get more complicated if you have multiple wi-fi adapters, or an ssid that differs from the profile name, but the above should cover the general case.

If you are a recruiter wishing to contact me with regards to some job opportunity, please read this.

This article attempts to shed some light on what a microservice really is; it is meant as support material for other posts of mine that discuss microservices, mainly The Stateful Microservice.

What is a microservice?

If you go looking for information on what a microservice is, you will find many different descriptions, exhibiting considerable difference of opinion. Most claims about microservices are non-technical rather than technical, for example the allegedly "independent" software development style around microservices, or some alleged organization of microservices "around business capabilities". Even when the claims do stick within the technical realm, they are often unwarranted; for example, I have seen statements to the effect that a microservice is supposed to live in its very own source code repository, that microservices must communicate with each other via nothing but REST, etc. My favorite one is that they must necessarily be stateless. This paper is a first step in dispelling the statelessness myth.