Who am I?
For those who haven’t already met me, my name is Niels Albers. I’m a DevOps Engineer who’s been doing all kinds of stuff in IT since 1998. If you want my professional credentials, I suggest you hit my LinkedIn profile, that should give you a reasonably up-to-date summary of who i’ve worked for, and what I got up to while I did.
What’s my purpose in life?
What gets me up in the morning? Trying to figure out the HARD problems in large-organisation IT. Mostly the ones that arise from the fact that we still don’t have a good idea how to organise large groups of people working on complex, multi-part applications, plus all the infra that comes with that.
Agile helps. DevOps helps. Infrastructure as code helps. Some of the new tools, techniques, and buzzword of the month methods that somehow find their way to senior management also help, but getting any of them to work consistently seems to elude most of us. I don’t think I have all (or indeed any) answers, but I think it’s long past time that I report on what I personally have learnt, in the hope that better minds than mine can take those lessons, combine them with others, and maybe put together a set of working principles that you can teach all the kids learning IT at our higher education facilities. Turn our profession into one with known rules.
What’s this big round thing coming towards me very fast?
What do I do outside of work? Raise my two almost adult sons together with my long-suffering wife and 2 labrador retrievers. Play the odd computer game, watch movies of dubious quality and hang out on Facebook with old friends who for various reasons now live on the other side of the planet. Read, if I can find anything that suits my fairly geeky taste in reading.
… and will it be friends with me?
Want to get in contact? Details on how can be found on the Contact Page