about me

I was born near the Dutch border in 1973 and had a normal school life there. In 1994 I started studying Meteorology in Bonn and while writing my thesis in 2000 joined WetterOnline (founded in 1996) and started a career as a programmer. In 2004 I changed to system administration and took over the responsibility for our datascenter and servers and also the team lead for our admins. To get a deeper understanding in networks, computers and applications I started studying informatics in the evenings after my daily duties in 2003 and got my degree (“Diplom Informatiker FH”) in 2007.

Until 2018 I  had to spend a few nights (as part of sharing a 7×24 on call with colleagues) keeping my company online as we did not have redundant networks and every outage (like power failures) had to be dealt with manually. Back then (I wasn’t aware of AWS which started in 2006) I dreamt of having the ability to manage a datacenter with redundant and elastic capabilities via browser, CLI or SDK as this would have made my life much easier. 

In 2018 my company started the migration to AWS from datacenter to cloud and with my pain of 14 years of (physical) datascenter experience I fell in love with the cloud immediately. In the evenings after work I stayed in office to learn AWS by means of online documentation and udemy courses and got AWS certified by the end of 2018.

To get rid of datacenter responsibilities and to have more time for cloud projects I left the datacenter team in 2018. 

As of now I am responsible for cloud projects (and as the cloud and datacenter team have merged in 2020) and datacenter projects as well. 

Please also find a short table of my vita on this page.

I am going to showcase some projects here but of course, I cannot outline detailed information about company projects. I am going to give rough descriptions of my work as well as my certifications of diverse cloud or unix related projects.

If I could freely choose my tasks, I would certify as a solutions architect professional and become the glue for many teams in the company for comparing AWS solutions and designing workflows. For my current work this is not necessary and so I do not have the time to go the deep learning path to professional solutions architect certifications yet. But becoming this is on my wishlist for the next years for sure.