Hi everyone,

Thank you for ending up here at my first post, blog, or however you'd call it. Let me briefly introduce myself, how I got to hear about Steem and how I aim to use this platform.

About me

My name is Laurens Koning. 38 years young, living in the south-west area of The Netherlands. I'm married, 2 kids, have some hobbies and feel generally quite happy. During the week I spend about 40 hours as a freelance Software Tester and Scrum master.

As I am a little bit privacy skeptic I won't post a lot of pictures. Especially not from my wife and kids. They can and should do that on their own initiative if they like. Besides that I have to figure out Steemimg...

For me, most hobbies are temporary, some are not. Playing bass-guitar in bands once started and I am still doing it. Do-it-yourself building/designing guitar-fx came and stopped somehow. I have a lot of interests like these that came by and went away. Home automation (Domoticz) was a temporary hit, now over. Currently it's cryptocurrency all over. Let's see how long it lasts.

I am currently bass-player in a band called Deformus. We have some clips on YT/FB:
https://www.facebook.com/deformus

Introduction to Steem

Somewhere in Marcch 2017 due to some articles on a famous Dutch news-website I gained interest in cryptocurrencies. It probably was about a small group of people making unthinkable amounts of money having Bitcoins since it started.

I started reading, watching videos and eventually put money in it. The well-known @JerryBanfield named Steem in some of his podcasts I was listening to while in daily commute. He and @Suppoman learned me a lot about digital currencies, tokens and assets for which I am very grateful now.

Finally, August 2017, they managed to trigger my interests enough to make me subscribe to Steem and acquire some tokens and really start to think about sharing knowledge and create content on this platform. Do reckon, I never published content, never posted a lot on LinkedIn or Facebook. I do realize that I gained quite some knowledge over the years, but is it really something I can monetize in a way?

Using it

I 'm neither a blogger, vlogger or have any real experience in content creation. I don't have the ambition to become one, but I would like to have a go with earning Steem by producing content and curating. Maybe it works for me or maybe not. As a software tester and believer in 'Specification by example', I have to use it to find out if it works for me. Up to present day I found it very overwhelming. I don't really understand all the used terminology and details, and as far as I know I am not really stupid.

I mentioned some hobbies. I aim to write about these when I think I have an interesting thought about the subject. Currently possible candidates are:

• My ambition to move from MS Windows 10 to a Linux distribution and being fully productive using it. By now, I've almost managed to and gained a lot of knowledge about using Linux
• I don't really like big Coin-exchanges like Kraken or Poloniex. How do I invest in digital currencies then? And how do I manage these?
• I am writing and implementing BDD-specifications every other day at my job. A lot of my colleagues do have their personal blogs where they share code and insights. I never got the idea behind doing that. I'd rather use Steem for this due to its incentive to have a little more gain then just being known at the local ICT-contract-market.

Thank you for your interest and valuable feedback. Looking forward to try to come up with valuable content.

Regards,
Laurens.