Andre's Web Services
About Andre
I love automation (why do things yourself when you can get computers to do the work for you?). Love Serverless and cloud technology.
IT background
Started out studying Accountancy in the Netherlands
In the mid 90’s I studied Accountancy with the view of working for the “big 4” firms in Electronic Data Processing which took my fancy. It didn’t eventuate like that, but experiencing coding in Pascal, SQL in dBase and spreadsheets in IBM Lotus 1-2-3 showed me what could be possible with technology.
Professional IT in the Netherlands
After University, I worked for a Consulting firm, where I did two long terms contracts for our clients. One for a bank and one for a large Insurance company. System Engineer and Application engineer respectively. Worked on internet banking in late 1998, data warehouse, Desktop application deployments across a country wide network and many other things.
Moving to Australia
In 2001 I moved to Australia, hoping to benefit from my working holiday visa, which didn’t really eventuate. The IT industry across the world looked different early 2002 than in early 2001 when I made my choice to move. I was unemployed for 9 months until I landed a job at the University of Sydney. I ended up working there in 5 different roles, for 20 years.
Professional IT in Australia (and other places)
At the University of Sydney I looked after the Blackboard Learning Management System, first for a single department and then for the entire university. I also developed a middleware system for student enrolment data to go into the Blackboard system, making my life easier. That enabled me to work on many other things for the University while still looking after the LMS.
While working at the University of Sydney, I managed to get some extended leave period. the first one was in 2004, for 6 months. With my wife we have our own company and we worked (from Austria) for Qatar Airways to build an internal portal system with some cool functionality.
In 2016 I went to the UK for 6 months to live and work so my wife could work on her Alzheimer’s research and I use the time to learn all about Amazon Web Services. I spent a lot of time studying and going socialising at Meetups in London. During that time I learned a lot about DevOps and clouds. By the time I got back in Sydney, I started a new role and my managers said “oh, you know about the cloud, here are the cloud keys, make stuff happen please”.. so I did that for the next 7 years.