Cloud Solution Architect

I’m a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert usually working as a solution, integration or even enterprise architect. I’m often involved in various types of cloud architectures, helping businesses transform the way they work, apply technology and use their data. I’ve taken inspiration from Domain Driven Design and believe that business domains are key to creating cross-functional teams, putting boundaries around functionalities in services and organizing data.

Speaker

Sometimes you can see me on stage at a convention talking about how we helped a client getting their platform or applications safely in production.

Devoxx Belgium 2024

At Devoxx my colleague Dante De Ruwe and I told the story of how we built a digital platform for exchanging readings from digital electricity and gas meters in Belgium, called “Turning Uncertainty into Success: How a Modern Approach can Thrive in a Conservative Environment”.

Dataminds Belgium 2022

With Koen Verbeeck (MVP) on Building a Low-Cost, High-Throughput Data Exchange Platform for Digital Meters on Azure

Developer

I started out as a C++ developer at a large financial institution, developing and evolving a client-server application that was installed at our clients. When .NET was still on version 1.1, I created my first ASP.NET tool to manage our development lab and from there I took over maintenance of a knowledge base application fully written in VB.NET. That’s how I got invested in the Microsoft .NET ecosystem.

Generalist

In the past years, I’ve been involved in maintaining projects, rescuing projects gone wrong and starting large greenfield applications involving multiple teams.

I took on the roles that fitted the needs of the projects. Sometimes I was the Solution Architect. Sometimes I had to take on other roles like Test Manager, Technical Lead, BI Developer, Functional Analyst.

I got inspired by Jeffrey Palermo’s Onion Architecture and then slowly got into Domain Driven Design to give me strong foundation on which to base my decisions.

Open Source and Blogging

I started small open source projects to experiment with newer technologies and blogged about them, mainly to document my findings. I got my five minutes of fame, exploring Microsoft’s upshot.js framework in combination with knockout.js for making Single Page Applications in this series on blogspot.com

It turns out that I often seem to experiment with Javascript, especially for making userscripts for the GreaseMonkey and TamperMonkey browser extensions. You can find them back on Github.

People Manager

While growing in experience, I started guiding junior developers, medior consultants and at one point I managed 4 teams purely from a people management point of view.

Even as this was a natural career progression and I did enjoy doing it, I missed the hands-on experience and having an impact on technological and functional topics.

The Cloud

Although I started out on Microsoft Azure long time ago and recently helped a client build his data sharing platform on it, I’ve also been involved in initiatives of clients adopting Amazon Webservices (AWS), migrating to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or building a hybrid solution with a Kubernetes in the cloud and Openshift on-premise.

So today I am building roadmaps and executing cloud adoption projects, regardless of the underlying cloud provider, to help clients adapt their organization, their development and operational processes, their technology choices … to find the real benefit that a cloud solution has to offer.