Alex Thissen

Alex has been involved in application development since the late nineties and worked as a lead developer and architect at small companies and large enterprises. He spent a majority of his time teaching other developers the details of the Microsoft development platform and frameworks, and coaches architects to design and build modern distributed web applications. He has been a certified trainer for more than 8 years.

Currently Alex works for a new startup company called Xpirit that provides premium consulting services on ALM, Cloud, enterprise mobility and security. His job title there is Lead Consultant.

Alex believes that application security is an important aspect of modern application development and especially for cloud and mobile applications. He practices and teaches secure coding, threat modeling and embedding attention for security into the development lifecycle.

Alex is a frequent speaker on various topics ranging from web development, to frameworks and libraries and security. He has spoken at conferences such as Microsoft TechDays, SDN conference, Engineering World, DevReach, IASA and OWASP chapter meetings, and for INETA user groups in Europe. He writes articles for Dutch magazines and is a technical reviewer for APress and Manning Press. Since 2007 Alex has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Visual C#. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director for The Netherlands.

In his spare time Alex likes to participate in all kinds of sport, and loves playing and programming new and retro video games.