About me
Growing up in Enschede in the east of the Netherlands I felt pretty early on I wanted to travel and see more than just my birth city. I studied Electronic Engineering & Telecom. After my studies I moved to Sweden at the age of 21. From living with my parents, to a working and living abroad! But it turned out I'd live in Sweden for 18 years! It's safe to say Sweden was an important element in my life, but in 2018 it was time to move on.
After 18 years in Sweden a new phase of our lives started as we moved to The Netherlands. I built this website to figure out how serverless static site production (jamstack, it's awesome, check it out). But also to tell the story of my life, so here we go I guess: A summary of my journey in live so far...
Work
I moved to Sweden to start work in a company called Projectplace. I worked there for seven years in everything from support, sales, account management and then to my main area of interest: IT. A good learning period, both professionally as well as personally. I learned living abroad, met interesting people and learned Swedish in this period.
I moved on to Tele2, to work as a Systems Engineer VoIP. I worked on the SIP Trunking platform for enterprise customers, fully built in opensource (OpenSER, Asterisk, FreeSwitch, etc). I also worked on in-house development of anti-spam for the mail platform (in use by 20M customers), VoIP services, DNS, and network infrastructure. Great stuff, I liked working for an ISP! Design, implementation and hands-on work on a large scale network. Also learned to know some of my best friends in this company.
Next came Klarna, a fast growing startup in the fintech sector. In the years I worked here as a Tech Lead networking infra, I designed and implemented virtually everything that had to do with infra: LAN, WAN, Data Center, CDN's and in the last phase also public cloud design. High tempo, lots of energy and milestones, structured everything from network spaghetti to documented designs: awesome! Learned a lot on growing a team of infra engineers, agile working in a startup with a high tempo, picking up new tech super quick, etc etc.
Then for something completely different: working for semi-government in the Swedish national broadcaster. Here I repeated the trick I did at Klarna and in under two years designed, procured and build a new WAN (34 PoP's, our own MPLS network used for remote productions and broadcasting), new office networking (Cisco SDA) and two new DC's (Cisco ACI). Cool new tech all the way from procurement via PoC and labs to production. Learned a lot about broadcasting and (remote) tv production as well, super interesting!
We then moved to the Netherlands for the next job: Enterprise Architect Infra for the largest bank in NL: ING. This was was more strategy: vision and design for both cloud / infra as well as investment related platforms. I designed and built infrastructure for new banks globally as well as helping existing banks (ING is active in 15 countries) with their infrastructure journey. Later I focussed on building retail investment platforms for global use. Quite a stretch from infrastructure, but I love to push myself into new areas and become specialised! A lot of work, travel and learning.
My current employer I joined as an Enterprise Architect, moved on to Infrastructure and finally became the CIO. The company I currently work for manufactures industrial components, brakes, valves, actuators and control equipment: Kendrion. In my current role as the CIO, I'm responsible for the IT department. My focus is to create a small but performant team of global specialists. We're mostly working remote and with a small team we cover a lot of systems and topics. We're working agile (sprints, etc), use modern tooling and (if I may so so myself) are quite a cool empmloyer for IT specialists.
Most of the time I had my own companies "on the side". From selling mobile phones (first online mobile phone shop in NL that sold phones without contracts), smart cards, satellite receivers (importer for NL for Dreambox!), gameservers (ClanHome), webhosting, data center consulting and colocation and radar detectors for cars: I did it all! In Sweden I also rented out satellite phones, for customers that travelled north to do fishing the wilderness and needed an emergency phone. Learned a lot about the online rental business, payment processing, checkout procedures and satellite tech.
Family
One more thing Sweden gave me was the girl I was looking for. We're both not originally from Sweden, so living in neutral territory was pretty good. We got married on Aruba, but have Swedish viking style wedding rings. I guess we like symbolism. A while later (2012 and 2015) we were lucky enough to get two great kids: Madeleine and Benjamin. It's been super busy since the 10th of April of 2012 one could say. Within Sweden we moved from Stockholm (Nacka) to Uppsala in order to get a a bigger house, but it wasn't really what we expected in many ways... In 2018 we moved to the Netherlands after a long period of thinking, analyzing and planning. In the Netherlands we started out in Amsterdan and finally landed in Haarlem (great city!), where we currently live.
Contact
If you want to contact me, you can do that here. I'm not into social media much, but some other way of contacting me you find below as well...