User:Tom de Neef

About

I am Dutch, trained as a physicist, worked as a manager in software engineering, currently retired. Creating software to solve problems is what I'm good at. If the problem has an educational twist and requires some mathematical insight, I will be very stimulated to work on it - for years if necessary. The first widely-used educational software for highschool mathematics in Holland was created by me in 1988. Still on the internet is my training program for Dutch conjugations (a Javascript re-do of Pascal code I wrote in 1985).

Currently, I spend most of my (computer) time on:

• "Genealogica Grafica" - shareware for the production of genealogical charts and reports. I started this to support the research of my wife, having discovered that traditional genealogical prograams produced minimalistic graphical outputs. I wanted outputs that were suitable for web publishing. Displaying inter-marriage accross many generations made this project extra interesting. During the years more and more users asked for support and suggested new charts. One of such charts was to plot the lifespan of families along a timeline. But the output was often frustrated by inconsistencies in the dates of family members. From then on much attention has gone into automatic validation of (the correlation of) dates in GEDCOM files. These tests are now so good that many users use the program for that purpose only.
• Developing software tools to provide insight into the Dutch perinatal registrations. These registrations are extensive and complete, covering more than 20 years. Until I got involved, the data could only be used for scientific research. You had to submit a detailed request and someone would try to answer your questions. The answers would lead to more questions and months could go by before you had a serious base for the validation of a hypothesis. Now, every gynaecologist can search the data for trends and correlations and compare the results of his/her own hospital with Dutch averages. I got involved accidentally: my neighbour was gynaecologist and he had set the database up in the 1970's.