My story.

From sound engineering to UNIX

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, raised in Curaçao and trained in sound engineering. When I arrived in the Netherlands in 2000, a company that provided support for HP offered to train me as a UNIX engineer. I said yes. Within a year, I was driving across the country repairing HP-UX servers for large companies and government organisations. I started with tape drives and worked my way up to more complex storage configurations with logical volume management. That was where I learned what it means to look after systems people rely on every day.

What Linux opened up

I first came across Linux in an HP-UX training manual. I wanted to see what it could do, so I installed it on my Intel PC at home. A few years later, I joined Netland, an early Dutch open-source company, where I supported Linux systems and helped build NeoNova, our own Linux server for businesses.

I went on to work at a consultancy alongside some of the best Linux engineers I’d met and earned my first Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. If I remember right, I scored 290 out of 300, one of the highest scores in my group. I was proud of that. It had all started with a training manual and a PC at home.

From production operations to cloud architecture

My work took me into banking, emergency dispatch and rail. At Rabobank, I automated patching and upgrades for the WebSphere clusters behind a critical payments application. At ProRail, I helped automate Linux infrastructure across hundreds of servers. I started experimenting with AWS in 2009. Over time, it became central to my work in cloud architecture, DevOps and platform engineering, including through my consultancy, Nondual IT.

One of the projects I’m proudest of is GOPACS 2.0. I grew from DevOps engineer into the system architect role, designed the AWS architecture and led the move from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Our team set up separate environments and automated delivery so we could test and release changes in a controlled way. Both penetration tests returned only low-severity findings. I later worked on the reliability and automation of Stedin’s OpenShift platform.

Coming home to Curaçao

In 2025, after about 25 years in the Netherlands, I moved back to Curaçao with my family. I wanted my children to experience some of what I had growing up here and get to know their roots for themselves. I also wanted to bring what I’d learned back to the Caribbean.

At Ictual, I help clients with complex Oracle migrations, performance and security, and lead the architecture, security and cost management of our internal AWS environment. I speak Papiamentu, Spanish, Dutch and English.

Still building things for myself

When the SSH client I wanted to use on a Windows workstation got stuck at sign-in, I decided to build one around the way I work. That became ZERO Trust SSH Client, which I released as an open-source app for macOS and Windows. I used AI to help develop the app, create its website and package the deployment to AWS. Most of my time went into deciding how it should work, testing it and fixing what broke.

After more than 20 years in IT, I still enjoy sitting down with someone, figuring out why a system is giving them trouble and leaving it easier for them to run.