User:Balusc

Bauke Luitsen Scholtz (also known as BalusC) is a deaf web application developer specialized in Java EE and particularly JSF. He maintains a mixed Dutch/English Java related blog at blogspot.com. He visits Wikipedia very frequentlty, especially the English and Dutch releases. He is mostly interested in articles about the culture (folks, languages, origins, etc), nature (fauna, flora, climate, weather, etc), geography (world, countries, places, etc) and the history (periods, movements, big names, wars, etc).

Family
Bauke was born in Haarlem, The Netherlands in March 26 1978 as the eldest son of a Dutch couple who married at 1974. He has one sister born in 1981 and one brother born in 1983. After the divorce of his parents in 1985, his father remarried in 1992 and Bauke got another half sister in 1995 and another half brother in 1997. His mom remarried in 2007. He's had no contact with his mom since 2003.

The grand-grandfather on his fathers side was German, hence the Germanic last name. The grand-grand-grandparents on his mothers side were Portuguese.

Bauke is married since June 11 2004 with two children, a son born in October 7 2002 and a daughter born in February 5 2004. Since October 6 2013, he is separated.

Deafness
At a relatively late age of about 2.5 years pre-lingual deafness was confirmed which was caused by Rubella during pregnancy. Until that age, the deafness could not be confirmed for sure because of unexpectedly negative test results.

Nickname
His nickname 'BalusC' is a concatenation of the first two characters of each name part of his full name Bauke Luitsen Scholtz. It was invented at 1995 when he created a small ANSI DOS Batch program to select DOS games out of his collection and directly run it: "Gamemenu made by BALUSC". It was for personal purposes only. Later when he joined the IRC chatrooms at 1996, this acronym was used as nickname to identify himself. After quickly becoming more familiar with the netiquette and having learnt that CAPS == SHOUTING, he decided to lowercase the middle characters, and thus the nickname 'BalusC' was created. The last character is still uppercased, because 'everyone did it also', referring to the so-called good old l33t speak. This nickname remains unique and practically all Google hits refers uniquely to himself and/or his website.

Education
Bauke completed the HAVO at Alexander Graham Bellschool in Amsterdam in 1996 after 6 years. In 2000 he got a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Science at Hogeschool van Amsterdam in Amsterdam after 4 years of study.

Computers
Bauke is a computer programming autodidact who started with C64 Simons' BASIC around 1989 and has built up experiences with at least HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, XSLT, REXX, Java, Java EE, PHP, SQL and WSDL. Bauke is also a computer hardware geek since 2nd half of 1996.

Bauke is active on the computer science Q & A website stackoverflow.com. He has a reputation rating of 421,963 as of 2013-09-24. Java Server Faces (JSF) questions are his most active topic.

Languages
Bauke is grown up with Dutch Sign Language as native language. He is, in spite of being deaf, relatively fluent in Dutch reading and writing. Most Dutch deaf people have a problem with the Dutch grammar, because it differs quite a lot from the grammar of the Dutch Sign Language. He can moderately speak Dutch, the problem is more that he lacks in setting the correct linguistic stress and therefore he sounds more monotonous.

Bauke can moderately read and write English, his writing tends to follow the British English. He cannot speak English, at least not that understandable enough. Because English is not a phonetic language, it is relatively very hard to learn speaking it based on the writing. Further on he can read, write and speak some basic Papiamentu, the local language of Curacao.