Patrick Broens

Patrick Broens, born in 1970, owns his own company (Sole Proprietorship) in Tilburg, The Netherlands. He started programming on a Sinclair ZX80 computer, continued this on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and switched from Commodore to MSX and even an Osborne 1 machine. Most of his work then were games. He was one of the first on the Internet in Holland and therefore thinks he's a pioneer. When the Internet was available for the public, he published his first personal website and made the finals in a webdesign contest which then existed.

After his study Mechanical Engineering and doing some work in logistics, he decided to go to the Artschool. Although the emphasis went more to design, he never stopped programming, For 12 years ago this was, yes dear readers, ASP and Perl.

Working for a company in Utrecht, he discovered CMS systems like the commercial RedDot. After switching jobs, there was a difficult choice: start programming his own CMS or search for one that was quite similar to the ones he was used to work with. He decided to go for the first option. After a crash of his computer with lots of smoke and fire, after three months of programming, he suddenly discovered "friendly ghost" Kasper Skårhøj's work and was glad someone else had the same thought. All the websites he made since are done in TYPO3. This was in 2001.

At the first TYPO3 Dutch/Flemmish User Group day in 2005 he met other people from the community, for the first time. Especially Ben van 't Ende has encouraged him to do more in the TYPO3 community.

Patrick lives in Tilburg, The Netherlands, with his girlfriend Diane, their cat Asafoetida and two nameless coffee cafetieres.