Systems engineering with a hacker spirit. Feel free to add as many 'seniors' to the title as you prefer :) Oh and if you thought 'hacker spirit' is bad for business, you've got it the wrong way around. It's just that when it ends up on a C-level desk, it has passed through so many layers of marketing they call it a solution! That's actually not a bad summary of what I've been up to lately: from probl... uhh, challenges to solutions.It's not just technology, though. Communicating with other people, technical or not so, has been a significant part of my career. I believe the C belongs right where it is between the I and the T. Actually getting things done – the way the customer wanted them, on time and within budget – has always been a priority for me. As a systems engineer my core competencies include automating the boring things, administration of various operating systems and cloud platforms, network engineering, scripting, virtualization and information sec... - oh excuse my french - cybersecurity.While your pets might have turned into cattle in the cloud era, OS knowledge is still very much required, even though perhaps from a different angle. I still know my ip from my netsh, but I'm no stranger to Ansible and Terraform either. Scripting is obviously a valuable skill on any environment. The same goes for networking. I very much like a REST API on my router or an IaaS network by a cloud provider, but in order to operate those I still need to know the how IP routing and TCP works. I might prefer a Headscale-operated Wireguard network but I'm afraid I can't afford to forget about all the IPSec parameters just yet. In short, 'how does the Internet work' has always interested me (and yet it still manages to surprise me every second time).As of late, I've become more and more focused in security. We should design systems secure by design instead of adding layers of security when forced to. I'm somewhat concerned that we're re-introducing old vulnerabilities in the cloud that have been basically a solved problem for decades. An unauthenticated S3 bucket bucket is not much more cool than a publicly accessible SMB share if what you have there is supposed to be confidential. Zero Trust is a nice model and all but it doesn't mean that you can suddenly expose your admin interface to the public. Security obviously can't hinder business, but implemented correctly, it doesn't have to either. I'm also fond of open standards and open software. That's what the entire Internet as we know it today is built on, after all.