Erik Valkering has always been very interested in programming. Already at the age of 11, he was introduced to QuickBasic via a friend of his. During high school, he tried varying languages, like Visual Basic, Pascal, and Assembly, but eventually fell in love with C++. After high school, he did a Bachelor in Computer Science at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, while working as a part time software developer at TNR Software. After graduating cum laude, he obtaining a MSc in Computer Science from the Delft University of Technology. After working for 8 years at TNR Software, he decided it was time to move on, and was hired as a software engineer at Plaxis BV.

At Plaxis, he is the product owner within a team of software engineers and geotechnical quality assurance engineers. At his work and during his free time, he's always interested in using the state-of-the-art in software engineering, and especially Modern C++. For several (hobby) projects, he already
managed to crash the compiler, resulting in those uninformative 'Internal compiler error' messages. If you get those, you know you're doing bleeding-edge stuff :)