I was born on october 27th 1968 in The Hague.
Till age 5, I lived with my parents in the village of Voorburg (near The Hague)
After that, we moved to the village of Vreeland which is exactly in between Utrecht and Amsterdam (both are within a 30 minutes drive by car) and which is near the Dutch radio and tv city Hilversum.
By the time we moved to Vreeland, I already had some electronics experimenting kits and electrical lego.
After primary school in Vreeland, I went to the 'Gemeentelijk Gymnasium' in Hilversum. There it soon showed that while I may have this knack for understanding deeply technical matters, learning languages was not the thing for me. (Of course, I'm writing this in English, which is not my primary language, so somehow I did learn foreign languages afterall..)
After 3 years of Gymnasium I decided to switch to a school type that concentrated a bit more on other things then languages, and finished my middleschool education the next year (a year earlier then I was supposed to, something which actually made it into the regional newspapers.
After this I went for enhancing my diplomas with a higher level for mathematics, physics and biology. Meanwhile I involved myself deeply in writing office and entertainment software for various small computer systems, most notably the C64/128 machines.
During my last year of school, I started working for IBM (this is 1989 now). I started out there doign an investigation into adaptations for disabled people.
Soon I grew into doing customer and reseller support, and within 3 years I had moved into consultancy and development support.
During this time, I was also quite involved in early virus protection and prevention measures, testing of Linux 0.x versions, development and testing of the ISDN for BSD software (i4b) for which I am still mentioned in the credits of the 3 major BSD distributions
After IBM decided to drop its support for OS/2 for consumers in the mid 90s, I started feeling unhappy there, and was wondering if it was time to move on and look somewhere else. It did in the end take untill 2000 before I actually did move on tho. Lots of interesting projects had been going on at IBM, two of which have kept me busy for a long time (installing and maintaining a network for stock trading and the intranet/internet solution for Dutch parliament)
In september 2000 I joined DOOSYS, a relatively small development and consultancy company.
During my time at DOOSYS, I have been involved in setting up a secure network for their application provider business and did consultancy on matters like security and privacy as well as on network scaling.
At the same time, I developed a module for the Apache webserver for use with an application developed by DOOSYS.
In 2002, DOOSYS got into financial trouble, and had to revamp itself in order to survive. I left the company in november, and have been working as a freelance consultant and network specialist since.
Much of my consulting work has been for Mytholos, a now defunct application service provider, and involved moving their in-house datacenter to a co-located one, building a virtual desktop platform to support thin clients and reduce the cost of ownership of the internal IT infrastructure.
In the late 2000s I accepted a position as technical application specialist and infrastructre engineer at OCLC. In this role I have been involved in building a number of prominent solutions for public and university libraries, typically providing both the underlying infrastructure, and adapting the application environment to support customer specific workflows.
In 2017 I started a position at Nieuwland Geo, a company specialized in providing solutions for realtime geographic data, from hosting to software to data quality services. In this role I've mostly been busy migrating the traditional datacenter infrastructure to an IaaS solution and changing from a classic operations environment to one based on a devops approach. This includes migrating from a RHEV/Ovirt enviornment to a vSphere based one, implementing orchestration and deployment tooling and reviewing and updating technical architecture and design.