From the moment the 486 computers graced our desktops, I've been completely immersed in the world of computer systems and networks. It's a vast landscape, full of endlessly fascinating avenues to explore, and frankly, it's always kept me thoroughly engaged. But out of all those captivating areas, my deepest interest and primary focus have always been on infrastructure management.
What started as a simple hobby quietly grew into a genuine, burning passion for everything IT.
The constant evolution within the IT industry continues to absolutely captivate me. I'm always learning, always honing my skills, driven by that principle of continuous personal development. This insatiable curiosity, combined with my extensive experience across so many different IT domains, has given me a truly comprehensive perspective – I can see the entire infrastructure landscape, from the front-end right through to the back-end.
Over the years, I've noticed a natural pull towards taking on leadership roles within smaller teams and overseeing projects. While I'd definitely describe myself as a hands-on IT generalist, I also have a knack for optimization, organization, and strategic planning.
Ultimately, there's immense satisfaction in effectively communicating with clients and colleagues, nurturing those positive relationships, and seeing a project successfully come to fruition. It's incredibly fulfilling.
With a proactive and analytical approach, I quickly identify and resolve critical infrastructure issues, minimizing downtime and business disruption.
I'm a big advocate for bringing in new technologies and innovative solutions. My goal is always to make systems more reliable, more secure, and ready to scale.
I specialize in optimizing IT operations to deliver infrastructure that's not just robust and secure, but also highly available.
I put best practices into action across system monitoring, maintenance, and incident management, which means end-users always get the essential services they need without a hitch.
I focus on building collaborative, high-performing teams, empowering individuals to reach their full potential.
I'm passionate about coaching, encouraging continuous learning, and cultivating a cohesive unit focused on shared success and technical excellence.
I'm adept at taking complex IT infrastructure visions and crafting them into practical strategies and detailed roadmaps.
The key for me is ensuring successful project delivery by aligning technical initiatives with overall organizational goals to achieve the best possible results.
In my role as a Service Desk Manager and Technical Team Lead, I've had the chance to lead some pretty cool projects. What I loved about this job is getting to combine my technical skills with guiding a team to success. My major focus has always been on making customers happy while also figuring out how to make our day-to-day work easier. A prime example? I managed the optimization of our ticketing system and streamlined our processes. We saw a leap in efficiency and how well the team performed. It's that project-focused mindset that helps us deliver not just strong technical solutions, but also keeps everyone – clients and customers alike – satisfied.
I truly enjoyed collaborating with colleagues and delivering tangible results.
A key aspect I valued was customer interaction, learning to tailor communication so clients could easily understand complex technical information.
Working within a team you can develop and that fosters growth and achieves success on both small and large projects brought me immense satisfaction.
Leading the Infrastructure team for a steel company, I took charge of a huge IT modernization project. Beyond keeping their existing systems up and running, I focused on creating a strategic roadmap and a comprehensive plan for renewing their entire infrastructure. This involved a detailed audit of their old environment and a clear breakdown of all the costs.
The whole point of this initiative was to drastically improve their operational efficiency and build a future-proof IT foundation for sustained growth..
This was a particularly interesting project because, initially, it was pure chaos. Existing documentation was several years outdated, there was no network plan, and while firewall redundancy was present, WAN redundancy was absent. All data, including backups, traversed the same network. I found conflicting GPOs, non-IT personnel with admin rights, and ongoing payments for licenses of decommissioned products. Servers and storage which were not used connected to the network, the server room lacked air conditioning, and network cables, patches, and pods were completely unlabeled.
Despite how this might sound like a complaint, I genuinely found the experience very rewarding.
I was responsible for implementing a robust DTAP environment for a software development client, and it was a critical initiative that really streamlined their entire software development lifecycle.
We established distinct, secure stages for Development, Testing, Acceptance, and Production. This strategic setup has led to a significant improvement in the reliability and efficiency of their software deliveries, directly enhancing overall software quality.
By introducing structured processes and rigorous testing, this project now effectively minimizes risks and optimizes deployments, ultimately speeding up their time to market and boosting stakeholder confidence.
The FreeBSD jail setup + management and Tomcat setup were published online and the jail setup was referenced in "BSD Magazine".
This project marked my first time in a leadership role.
As a side note: a large retailer in my country was impressed of this architecture/infrastructure set up which led to us prepping their devops environment like ours.
Your insights and our 'hack sessions' were invaluable, and for that, I'm truly thankful. You know who you are. Carpe noctem.
I collaborated closely with an international IBM team to set up a robust cluster for a client in the banking and finance sector. My main job was to really dig into the crucial stages of this cluster, rigorously testing and automating both the acceptance and production environments. This effort significantly upgraded the client's core infrastructure, improved the overall system reliability and how efficiently everything ran. Getting it successfully deployed within time and budget meant we built a stable and highly scalable system. It's truly a resilient foundation and was crucial for handling their complex, high-volume operations.
Hellish deadlines. Caffeinated sprints. And an excellent PM, and team!
The client served as a pilot for a new software project. As installation and configuration guides were not yet available, some leading software developers were involved in this pioneering effort. I absorbed knowledge like a sponge, and coffee.
For a client in the wholesale sector, I led a significant project to modernize their entire Windows infrastructure. This initiative included deploying RODCs strategically across each branch, greatly enhancing both security and operational efficiency and reworking their DFS for the foreign branches.
To establish seamless and resilient inter-branch communication, I engineered VPN connections and implemented SD-WAN, ensuring connectivity and network performance.
Furthermore, I was responsible for crafting and deploying firewall and UTM rules to establish granular control over user access and fortify the network's security posture. This comprehensive overhaul has provided the client with a secure, high-performing, and future-ready network backbone.
For a government client, I had a crucial role in their backup and recovery infrastructure upgrade. This project involved replacing the Unix servers for Linux and Windows servers and to rollout a redundant fiber network in combination with SAN storage and tape libraries, significantly beefing up their data storage infrastructure.
Working in close collaboration with the system administrator, we carefully reconfigured the backup schedules and wrote the documentation and backup & recovery procedures.
Additionally, together we developed the DR plan and tested this partially (only on the SAN slave), making sure the client's operational continuity and data integrity.