Anne Jan Brouwer and Lord BugBlue
From complaining out loud about a televised government app-a-thon to being hired by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport as lead developer RoHS running a team of devs to work on all the covid backend infrastructure exception routes and making sure no person is left in digital limbo in just under an hour.
When late 2019 the first signs from China of the novel Corona virus came I was intrigued,
During the first "lock down" in the Netherlands our Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport created an app-a-thon . . and much hilarity ensued.
As all geeks had seen . . nice ideas people . . but Apple and Google already have a standard agreed.
And a lot of us "Dutch Hackers" where pretty vocal about it as usual.
Meanwhile at "the ministry" a civil servant started hiring people from the Dutch hacker scene.
Late December 2020 it came to their attention that there was some missing or ancient infrastructure in place for vaccine registration, not at all ready for the then upcoming vaccination landrush.
14th of December I get a call . . can you clean your calendar for the year?
Sure . . just over two weeks, one of them I had planned as holiday anyway to watch CCCongres talks. .
Little did I know they meant clear agenda for 2021 .. and 2022 . . not 2020.
This story takes you from getting very privacy and security aware infrastructure for registering the first ever Covid vaccination in the Netherlands built and tested in 3 weeks to the current state of the DCC infra up close and personal.