The author

Howdy!

If you’re reading this, you probably want to know more about the bloke that maintains this website.  All right, let’s get rolling!

Personal life

Offer me a drink and maybe we’ll discuss this.

Education

I hold a Master’s Degree in Multimedia and Telecommunications Engineering from the Faculty Engineering of the University of Mons, in Belgium and formerly known as the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons.  That means I’ve spent a lot of time in my University (well, some of my teachers would disagree on that, but let’s not dwell on it) learning about the fundamentals of electromagnetism, how telecommunication system work, as well as some basic of wireless and optical fibre systems.  Signal processing was also on the program, on both the software and hardware sides, for applications as diverse as video manipulation or electrical signals filtering.  In French, this kind of school is named “polytechnic school”, and it’s true to say we come out as polyvalent people in our field.

Meanwhile, on my off time (and, well, some of my “on” time too…), I spent a lot of time at my university students computer club (the keyword here is, “a lot“).  We have the incredible chance that some of the student room buildings network is managed by the students: the university manages the switching infrastructure and provides us with IP addresses, and we do all the rest.  This gave me an opportunity to develop numerous technical and non-technical skills, from organizing a 200 player LAN Party with a motivated team to managing a virtualization infrastructure to provide services to the students.  I’ll probably never forget the hours spent setting up multicast retransmission of DVB-T streams in an hybrid Cisco/Netgear environment.

In the end, the mix of all the above gives an engineer that has a pretty good understanding of the modern communications worls, from both the IT and Telecommunications side.  I’ll probably never be an RF Engineer that masters the obscure art of the 256-QAM in high noise environments over µWave links, but I have a pretty good understanding of how your messages are transported from one terminal another.

The turning point probably was internship at Thales Belgium, followed by a thesis around information security.  Like many other of my generation, I made a deep dive into the information security world.  A few years later, I still haven’t surfaced, and I must say I’m enjoying the ride so far!  Understanding encryption has become understading what lies behind “information security”, and everyday I understand more that the learning path will never end.

Professional life

I‘ve once read a very interesting book called “The Pragmatic Programmer” that, amongst other clever things, you should apply the DRY principle: Don’t repeat yourself!  The footer of my website includes a link to my LinkedIn profile, don’t hesitate to take a peek.