About

I am an experienced freelance Linux systems engineer and open-source enthusiast with 31 years of hands-on experience in managing and optimizing Linux environments, on-prem as well as in AWS and GCP.

My expertise spans both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Debian-based distributions, making me proficient in a wide range of Linux systems.

I have worked as a sysadmin, Oracle DBA, DevSecOps engineer and Google Cloud Architect at multiple MSP's and as a freelancer for over a decade. The broad knowledge I have gathered in IT, led to the decision to pursue my passion professionally, which is finding creative solutions to complex problems.

-- Mark

Open Source

I'm a huge proponent of open source software. Having worked with big-tech products for decades, I noticed a pattern of dependency without the required control to adjust for ever more rapidly changing infrastructure needs. This lack of digital sovereignty can have huge implications on the ability of a company to build and maintain a sustainable and resilient infrastructure.

A company or government entity should strive for digital sovereignty, which means the ability to control its own digital infrastructure, technologies, data, and online processes without an external dependency on foreign entities or large technology companies.

The best and most efficient way to achieve that, in my opinion, is to move away from big tech and towards open source solutions. Several EU governments have already begun this process by exhanging Microsoft software and services for open source solutions.

This movement gained momentum when the European Commission appointed Henna Virkkunen as the first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024.

Penetration testing

Over the last two years I have expanded my cyber security knowledge through the penetration tester career path at HtB. This supplemented my skillset with that of a potential attacker perspective and was a very insightful experience.

If I can take away one thing from these newly gained perspectives, it's that the Unix philosophy is more important now than it has ever been, even though parts of the market seem to often be moving in a different, perhaps even opposite direction.