Blogging again

That's it! I'm starting blogging again.

The reason?

​That's easy - yet another year has passed by without blogging. Triggered by all those great messages from the community on Linked In, Twitter and various websites tagged: #vExpert. Don't get me wrong and I must admit: I was a bit jealous and angry. Angry to myself!

What happened?​

​Call it lazy, call it busy, call it a writer's block or perhaps there are already so many great articles, blogs, sites to find on the internet which made me stopping blogging, why bother! Somehow I lost focus; I didn't enjoy writing anymore, too much hassle, no time, not good enough and on top of that: website hacked through an old blogging backend, which started receiving 16.000 emails a minute... I disabled the whole site.

Now what?​

Everything is up and running again. Including SSL certificate, nice Joomla extension, nothing special - just plain and simple (but should work great on mobile devices now).

Don't you know me?​

That's okay; my name is Bouke Groenescheij (I'm Dutch). Nice to meet you :-). In the past, I've worked with OpenVMS, maintained (storage) hardware (Hitachi), went into software maintenance (Windows NT), a little bit of software development (Delphi), implemented SBC environment (Citrix), doing trainings (one of the first VMware Trainers in the Netherlands), consultancy (VMware). I was the one who started the first VMUG in the Netherlands, together at XTG (which doesn't exist anymore now). I also worked together with Eric Sloof (NTPRO) and started blogging together, trying to steal each others posts - those were fun days... When things were simple :-). 

So what have I been doing?​ 

Well, the last 11 years, besides small jobs like health scans and implementations; I've been working at the largest bank in the Netherlands. Helping the team to understand their environment better, helped out with implementations and designs. I've been extensively working with Powershell and PowerCLI. I've also developed a framework which allows us to enforce the design, making like easy for us, the operators - and enable end users to consume the infrastructure by providing specific endpoints and orchestration (I call it a better VRO, since it's lightweight, bloody fast, in memory, extensible and fun to use). I also transitioned into an entirely different way of working, agile scrum DevOps: great stuff.

Now what?​

• logging my personal experiences so I can reuse that in the future, use the search engine to find the required documentation
• get that #vExpert badge back again (I had it once, so let's see if I can get one again)​

What topics?​

​Don't know - we'll see how it goes, at the moment I've got plenty of topics in the back of my head - troubleshooting, VROPS, PowerCLI, Powershell, ASP.NET, design considerations, cheapass solutions - whatever. Again, I'm doing this for me, whenever I can, wherever I am.

That's it for now; the first post will drop soon. Thanks for reading, and if you like how this all sounds: please let me know in the comments below (sure hope that works). Cheers!