About
Coming from a background in graphics, I have an eye for detail and creative solutions which allows me to offer and implement the right solution for the use case at hand. After over a decade in graphics I decided to move away from the industry and pursue activities in the IT sphere. Having activly worked in support and on various critical production environments allows me to think critical of approaches taken when implementing solutions, allowing me to work with efficiency, modularity and sustainability in mind. This experience also allows me to contribute to projects from kickoff, identifying pitfalls and opportunities early on and contributing to a smooth life cycle. With this background I aim to provide the best possible services for internal and external stakeholders.
My volunteer and team lead experience allow me to bring communication and people skills to the table. Whether it's with local or remote coworkers, internal and external stakeholders, I can understand goals and needs and translate these to actionable tasks and deliverables.
I'm a strong believer of documentation, iteration, testing, quality assurance while being pragmatic and always striving to improve processes and workflow to ensure quality and stability. I have a strong need to geek out and to better my current skill set, this offers me knowledge of a wide variety of technologies of which I actively seek out the best to test and implement if deemed worthy.
Experience
Consultant
Devops / Infra Lead
At Thanksys, a fintec startup backed by 2 major Belgian banks, I brought in past experiences to implement robust ways of working, allowing an agile roadmap to be clearly identified, analysed, implemented and maintained. In an effort to ensure Thanksys' hybrid transaction platform was ready for prime time, I moved the platform to Docker, onboarded the existing workflow and tools into infra-structure-as-code methodologies and significantly optimized the infrastructure to a lean, efficient and scalable solution leveraging cloud-native and VM solutions while supporting on-premise, bare-metal and enterprise-ready environments. While focused on achieving long term business targets, I cultivated devops and security practices within the team while incorporating industry standards in compliance.
While primarily active as DevOps Engineer and later on as infra lead my activities at Thanksys spanned from Infrastructure architecture, from analyses and design to implementation, maintenance and security, day to day IT operations as well as implementing and heading up Support Services.
Managed services Devops
As Managed Services Devops I built bridges between infrastructure, operations, development and business. From tweaking a stack to achieve performance and security to automating tasks and processes. In addition to supporting other departments in their needs, my day to day operations ranged from provisioning and integrating infrastructure, installing web applications, developing and setting up continuous integration and deployment tools as well as overseeing production deployments.
I took active part in first line Managed Services to identify and remedy any incidents, problems and change requests ranging from architecture, system administration and integrations and liaise with internal and external stakeholders to identify challenges and potential solutions.
Hosting and Support Lead
As Hosting and Support Lead I ran day to day operations of the Hosting and Support services and team of Wunderkraut and actively provided first line support to clients. In addition to maintaining and growing the existing client portfolio, services and team, I followed up administration and collaborated on offers, tenders and architectural designs.
Support Engineer
As the first dedicated Support Engineer of Krimson I took on existing and new clients and provided first line support services backed by the development team. During this time I collaborated with internal stakeholders to improve processes and tooling in order to bring the service to the next level.
Screen printing
At Totté a wide range of specialized printing techniques are applied to various media, with a focus on covers and packaging. I focused mainly on the more artisanal printing techniques.
Fleet marking
Primary tasks at TDP existed of printing incoming media on adhesive material and applying this to various objects such as backlit street maps and posters, expo panels, vehicles etc. In addition to the fleet marking I also collaborated with an industrial engineer on hammering out a prototype machine, it's usage and documentation that treated materials used in fleet marking larger, heavy duty vehicles.
Volunteer experience
- 2009-2011 - A&R + PR Manager / Web developer Lost Children Net Label
- 2008-2012 - Interviewer / Reviewer / Web developer at The Silent Ballet (online music magazine)
- 1996-2010 - Board member / Chairman / Event Coordinator at JH Wommel (NFP / NGO youth center)
- 1998-2001 - Leader at local Chiro chapter
Languages
| Dutch | |
| English | |
| French |
Skills and proficiency
Below an overview of different areas of my skill set, click through for more detail and background on these.
| Linux system administration | |
| CI / CD / CT | |
| Provisioning and configuration management | |
| Web development | |
| *aaS | |
| Version control | |
| Virtualisation | |
| Code and scripting languages | |
| Miscellaneous |
Linux system administration
I'm an active Linux user since the mid-2000s, usage and focus has mostly been focused as hobby / workstation and as LAMP/LEMP stack and Dockerized setups running web applications, both private and professionally. Over that time I've become proficient in running instances with longevity, stability and security in mind.
- Linux
- Arch Linux
- Debian and derivatives
- RHEL and upstream & downstream derivatis
- Webservers
- Apache
- Nginx
- Postgresql, MySQL and derivatives
- PHP
- Varnish
CI / CD / CT
I have experience with Continuous deployment, integration and testing systems. As well as in installing using and developing them as developing utilities used by them to accommodate technologies and other needs.
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous integration
- Continuous testing
- Jenkins
- GitLab CI
Provisioning and configuration management
When working with a lot of servers running the same, or near similar stack, a provisioning tool becomes a necessity to efficiently manage provisioning and configuration. In a professional capacity I've worked with an existing Puppet stack. For personal and professional use I have developed various Ansible stacks to provision local and remote machines as well as cloud native resources, leveraging and contributing to community roles as well as developing custom roles and tasks for edge-case scenarios.
- Ansible
- Ansible Tower
- Provisioning, monitoring and reporting through Jenkins
- Puppet
Web development
As most people who turned to working with an open-source a CMS, I started out with static content, moving into hacking together an improvised CMS before discovering and exploring the emerging CMS eco system. In 2012 I turned from Drupal hobbyist to Support Engineer at Krimson.
Over the years I’ve had the change to work with the broad ecosystem of Drupal in a wide variaty if market segments and applications ass well as the tools to maintain mission-critical instances. Keen on finding the right solution for the use-case at hand, I’ve recently become quite fond of SSG’s like Hugo and custom HTML5 / CSS3 / JS solutions.
- CSS / HTML / JS
- Content Management Systems and Frameworks
- Django, Flask and custom built solutions
- Drupal
- Drush
- Aegir
- Drupal as a Service
- Drupal Commerce
- Drupal Commons
- Open Atrium
- Integrations
- Alfresco
- CiviCRM
- Elastic Search
- SimpleSaml
- Solr
- Alfresco
- Static site generators
- Hugo
- Jekyll
*aaS
Over the years I've worked with several IaaS, Paas and SaaS providers, an outtake of these are listed below. I have experience with both the setup, management and usage of most of the listed tools. In recent years I have gained a lot of experience with AWS and handling various AWS services through Ansible code.
- Infrastructure as a Service
- AWS
- Digital Ocean
- Platform as a Service
- Acquia Cloud
- GitHub / GitLab pages
- Netlify
- Pantheon
- Platform.sh
- Software as a Service
- Atlassian
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Google Apps, Analytics, GTM
- New Relic
- OpsGenie
- Pingdom
- StatusCake
- Zendesk
Version control
As an active user of version control for many years, I've become a bit of an advocate of proper version control usage. I know the ins and outs of daily usage and how these tools tie in with workflows accross teams and tools.
- Git
- SVN
Virtualization
Virtualisation tools have been an important part of my toolkit for years. Mostly focusing on Vagrant, and introducing it into the tool chain at Wunderkraut, has opened the opportunity to stop massing around with tools that still allowed for the it works on my machine idiom. Though my hands-on experience with Docker is limited due to certain complexities which make it less compatible with my current toolchain and function, I fondly use it for testing applications as well running it for certain microservices. In addition to service virtualization I have extensive experience managing virtual machines on various infrastructure providers.
- Docker
- Vagrant
- VirtualBox
Code, configuration and scripting languages
Bash and Python are possibly my favourite language to write code in because it allows me to leverage an established and stable GNU / Linux toolkit or Python eco systen while being highly portable. I'm a fan of the do one thing and do it well philosophy that most GNU / Linux programs adhere to and try to apply the same principle in my own scripting and programs.
In working with Drupal I've gained a better understanding of PHP 5.x and 7.x as coding language, as well as running it in a LAMP/LEMP stack. Same goes for Ruby, in working with Vagrant I've got a workable understanding of the language.
Using and developing Ansible has given me a good working knowledge of Yaml and it's markup idiosyncrasies, tho I'm not considering this a coding or scripting language. In combination with the right tool chain such as Ansible or Drupal 8 it can be a powerful asset.
While working at Thanksys, I gained valuable insights in working alongside a Java development team and supporting Java throughout the build lifecycle and at run time. While I'm by no means a Java developer I have a basic understanding of the language, it's frameworks and have the capability to have informed discussions with a Java development team to achieve goals in a pragmatic and sustainable manner.
- Bash, Sh, Zsh, ...
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
- Yaml
Miscellaneous
In addition to the aforementioned, I have experience with the following.
- Backup / restore strategies
- GitLab and GitLab CI
- High availability infrastructure
- Laravel
- Load and stress testing
- Networking
- Operating systems
- Linux
- MacOS
- Windows
- Monitoring
- SEO/A
- Symfony
- Wordpress
Education and events
Events
- 2019 - Config Management Camp Ghent
- 2014 - DrupalCamp Ghent
- 2014 - DrupalCon Amsterdam
- 2013 - DrupalCamp Leuven - speaker
- 2012 - DrupalCon Munich
Education
- 1994-2000 - Graphics / Photography / Print processing
- 1993-1994 - Modern Humanities