My name is Jo Vanvoorden. I like to tell myself I have the following qualities:
- Fulltime geek
- Extremely loyal to my family
- IT / Electronic / problem solving Engineer
- Open source fan
- Linux is in my body and soul
- Automate and rule the world
- I don’t mind to make my hands dirty
My story
I’ve always been interested in technology, experimenting with new things, building electronic devices, playing with computers, hardware, software and all those other nice to have things. It all started at 12 when I bought my first soldering iron. I opened video recorders, tape drives, televisions and whatever broken device I could get my hands on. Pulling out parts and try to make something new with the scrap components from the broken devices. In those days we had a Tandy TRS-80, the early ages of the computing era and my first contact with something called BASIC programming. In the years to come, I got my hands dirty with QBASIC on Windows MSDos boxes. Windows 95 was introduced and replaced our windows 3.11 system.
During my higher studies I was introduced to a new palette of operating systems and that’s where I first got in touch with Linux. We moved to Windows 98 on our home computer and it must have been around that time I started experimenting with other operating systems and got introduced to RedHat, SuSe, Slackware, Debian, Gentoo and all other flavours I managed to download, burn on a CDR and try to install on my pool of machines I managed to get together. This pool of machines and only one active internet line, made us decide to install Freesco on some scrap machine and try to share the internet with everybody in the house. I was intriged by the power of that tiny little box, managing to deliver all what was needed and continued my journey. During those days Lan Parties were hot and I even co-organised a few. The highest visitors rate must have been around 120-130 people, enjoying a weekend behind their computer screens. Me as one of the organizers tried to make sure the networks stayed alive, everyone with their power hungry 19” or even 21” CRT screens was able to do their thing and went home with their disks full of …
Life got serious when I graduaded and entered my first real day job. I started working for a testing company, where they had linux and windows machines, but very soon I realized there was more to learn, more to experiment, more … I moved on to my next job and this must have been the point where I started using linux for real in my professional live. I migrated a single node sendmail box to a multi node postfix cluster, with spam detection, mysql user backend and the game was on. No machine was safe, old boxes got scrapped, new installations and configurations were rolled out in production and life was good. Good enough at least for the size of installations I managed by then. My girlfriend who in the years to come became my wife was continueing her studies in Leuven and there was an opportunity at the University of Leuven for a half time outsourced job, while working the rest of my time in my home town. I decided to take the offer and got introduced to an even bigger world of linux mayhem.
I started out as java software programmer there, writing building blocks for Blackboard. It was then when I figured out some of the processes could be improved, the boxes should be more stable and it must have been around that time were VMWare player entered my world, making it possible to run more application servers on the same machine, without interfering each other. Soon my reputation was made and I was offered a fulltime job in Leuven. We started improving and professionalizing every aspect of the learning system. I had the opportunity to work with vendors like Netapp, Citrix to improve uptime, redundancy and buy even more time to improve linux servers beyond the scope of the learning system. We introduced puppet for managing configurations and software, foreman to manage machines and at some point docker appeared on the horizon. Being eager to learn new stuff, we got our hands dirty and started creating processes and flows with jenkins to build, deploy and manage containers at scale. We discovered this nice company called Hashicorp and started playing with all of their products, integrating Vault and Nomad in our daily routine.
After my successes working with the learning system and other linux systems, I was asked to focus on the High Performance Computing scene and in the years to come I got very knowledgeable in infiniband fabrics, high speed storage boxes, designing HPC systems, managing these systems at scale and writing tenders for vendors to provide us with their best configurations. GPFS storage boxes, GPU systems for Artificial Intellegence, … all begging for my attention and so they all got the best of me.
All good things come to an end, and all endings offer opportunities for new beginnings. That being said, I started working for the university hospital UZ Leuven and entered a new world of challenges. I quickly got introduced in another world of managing containers using openshift, picked up some of the organisational habbits and started introducing automation tools and configuration as code. My focus has then shifted towards the support of the Nexuzhealth developers and deploying their software stack on Google Cloud Platform. Terraform came peaking around the corner and with the help of this fantastic product, we were soon building a continuous integration pipeline in Jenkins in order apply the principles of Configuration as Code to our best effort, allowing us to manage Google projects, kubernetes clusters, Google storage buckets, … This is a continuous and challenging task, as the landscape expands, all these products have a very high rate of change and you really need to stay on top of the game, trying to improve and learn in the ever continuous process of being a {Systems Reliability,Devops,linux,automation,<fill me in >} Engineer.
If you managed to make it here, by now you will hopefully understand my continuous drive for technology and knowledge and the quick adoption rate I’m applying to myself to stay on top of this game. I hope some of my posts will reflect this drive and I’ll try to share my successes and failures using this medium. It won’t all be geeky tech computer stuff. Apart from sticking my face in front of a screen, I do tend to play with 3D printers, LEGO, KNX, IOT, raspberry pi’s, love a good boardgame, grow my own greenhouse vegetables, play tennis, run, walk, do some fin swimming and be a good husband and parent for my three children.