People always seem to be asking me if I still learn things at software events after having attended over a hundred in the past decade. And they almost always seem surprised to hear that I do still get things from sessions (though admittedly, very often it’s not what the presenter intended me to take from their session), what I get the most from is interacting with people one-on-one. So recently, it dawned on me that if I’m getting so much out of these one-on-one conversations and so many people don’t seem to grasp how or why, that I should find a way to “package” these conversations and share them. GeekSpeak is my attempt to do exactly that.

This week, I’m bringing you a conversation that I had with Olé Lensmar during STARWest 2013. I actually met Olé the week before in Florida, but we didn’t get the chance to do an interview that week – mostly due to us deciding to join in on a weekly poker game with SmartBear developers instead <grin>.

While I suspect few of you have heard of Olé, I also suspect that most of you have heard of SoapUI, which he co-created. Personally, I’d been curious about SoapUI’s origins for quite some time, so I asked Olé to join me for a GeekSpeak session to share the story with all of us. Watch the video to see what Olé had to say.

About Olé

An astute eye for technology trends led Ole to his position as chief architect at SmartBear Software. Living his passion for software development, he co-founded base8, an XML-oriented consulting company, in 1996, and in 2006 he co-founded Eviware, which joined forces with SmartBear in 2011. Going way back, he first started as an avid Lego builder and then moved to building his first software on a 286 PC.

Going from Basic to Turbo Pascal, he knows the excitement of retrieving version 1.0 of Turbo C at the post office and the charm of a well-executed "mov ax, dx" instruction on his cabbed-down 386SX motherboard. Now that his 6-year old son beats him in every console game, he resorts to writing blog posts about code and the one thing software crafters should care about more than anything – quality.

Ole online: Network World | Personal Blog | Twitter

See also:

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