Me
I am Patrick Van der Veken and I am an IT consultant with many years of experience in system administration and managing operations in large(r) corporate environments. I have an educational background in Applied Economics but I have always treasured a great interest in Information Technology.
I consider myself a technologist in the IT domain but I try to avoid getting sucked in by the omni-present stupidity and enshittifaction that results from how IT very often is implemented. I am an advocate, (financial) supporter and user of open-source software both in the personal and corporate domains. I believe technology should first of all enhance the daily lives of living beings in an honest and non-abusive way. It should not exist solely to serve the greed of corporate entities or the shallowness of a happy few. The predominant theme in my career is working with some variant of *nix starting out with commercial Unices and gradually moving to the Linux ecosystem. My preferred Linux distribution is Debian for server roles and Linux Mint and/or ZorinOS on the desktop.
My work experience stretches from system administration to complex migration and automation projects. At times I have worked as a database administrator and middleware maintainer. I consider myself a generalist rather than a specialist with a good foundation in many IT areas. I believe in KISS and will avoid the next shiny and popular thing if doesn’t bring much to the table. I put a lot of importance in writing good (technical) documentation, often to the chagrin of my co-workers.
I value people who can distinguish between being competitive and being a bully in business. I do not believe there is a need to be obnoxious or under-handed in a professional context. Honesty and politiness are too rare and underestimated characteristics in colleagues and competitors. And also: “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck” (see the duck test)
I do not publish or maintain any other self-promoting platforms except for this site. I prefer to stay away from social media as much as possible. If you want to contact me: use the Contact form.
Site
I maintain and update this site whenever I have time in posting a story that I find worth sharing. Do not be surprised if - at times - there are large time gaps between the postings. Additionally I may post information on a different date than the story was actually written on. This is not meant to fill gaps in the timeline but rather to reflect that the story should have been posted around that particular date but that I never got around to doing so.
Project pages are not included in the category/tag taxonomy due to a limitation in the handing of collections in Jekyll.