THE PERSONAL SIDE OF THE TECHNICAL JOURNEY
The long road from
support desk to systems design.
I did not arrive in cloud engineering by skipping the foundations. I arrived through the calls, outages, network traces, migrations, late-stage troubleshooting, team responsibilities and lessons that came before it.
I am a practical engineer first. My work has moved across industries and technologies, but the central challenge has stayed surprisingly familiar: identify the real problem, work through the dependencies, and build a solution people can rely on.
I am naturally curious about the mechanisms behind a problem. Sometimes that means examining a route, a policy assignment, a failing service or a permission boundary. At other times, it means asking whether the process itself is making the work harder than necessary.
Over time I have become just as interested in the operational side of engineering—the quality of discovery, stakeholder expectations, failure handling, documentation and whether a system will still make sense when its original builder is not in the room.
Technical support & advanced ISP desk
A career begins in the network
My early work was rooted in the everyday realities of connectivity: broadband access, hosted mail, DNS, web hosting, customer equipment and escalations. It was an environment where users described symptoms, not root causes, and each ticket demanded careful isolation of the fault.
I learned to distinguish access problems from routing problems, service issues from client-device issues, and urgency from assumptions. Working with fibre, ADSL-era services and business connectivity taught me that the network is often the invisible foundation beneath everything else.
Advanced telecoms support → team management
The escalation desk becomes a classroom
Moving deeper into ISP and wireless services brought more complex fibre, LTE, Wi-Fi, VoIP and business-network incidents. Some required coordination with field and network teams rather than a quick remote fix. Later I took responsibility for frontline support operations, coaching people and helping manage escalations.
Management gave me a different lens. A technically correct solution matters, but so do clear handovers, the knowledge available to the team, queue health, quality standards and the way a customer experiences a service issue. Hiring, training and KPI reporting introduced me to the human systems surrounding technical work.
Implementations & senior MSP support
From fixing systems to delivering change
Implementation engineering changed the shape of my work. I configured Microsoft 365 environments, migrated mail to Exchange Online, deployed monitoring and endpoint protection, delivered firewall and network changes, and worked with virtualization and backup technologies. Higher-tier support continued to sit alongside project delivery.
This period taught me the difference between a change that technically completes and one that is operationally ready. Discovery, dependencies, validation and rollback considerations deserve as much attention as configuration commands. It is also where Microsoft cloud and identity work became a much bigger part of my technical direction.
Founder / independent IT services practice
Running the business, not just the technology
I founded and operated my own small IT services practice, delivering a mix of networking, security, cloud administration, VoIP, backup, monitoring and support for smaller organizations. Alongside technical delivery came requirements conversations, service expectations, billing, continuity planning and the need to balance ambition with what a customer actually needed.
Operating the practice reinforced that technology has to serve a commercial and human purpose. I built internal service processes, monitoring and customer-facing support routines as well as solutions. I closed the business in August 2025 as I transitioned into a full-time remote engineering role.
Remote senior engineer / US-based MSP environment
Engineering across borders
In August 2025 I joined a remote engineering arrangement serving a US-based MSP, starting at L2 and being promoted to Senior Engineer in January 2026. The work covers complex escalations and project delivery: Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Intune, Conditional Access, identity security, SharePoint/OneDrive, server and network infrastructure, and technical discovery for migrations.
At this stage I am increasingly drawn to repeatable engineering: structured read-only assessments, policy validation, responsible automation, well-defined pilots, and solutions that can be supported by the next engineer. The software I build alongside that work grows from real workflow needs rather than an interest in code for its own sake.
02 / WHAT EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT ME
Principles I work by.
Understand before changing
Audit first, know the existing state, define the scope and identify who or what a proposed change may affect.
Security must coexist with use
A control that prevents work or confuses people can become its own risk. Real deployment means testing both protection and usability.
Operational visibility matters
Logging, retries, traceable decisions and documentation determine how the system behaves after the initial implementation.
Acknowledge the stage honestly
Discovery, a pilot, an operational deployment and an exploratory prototype are different outcomes. I prefer to describe each one accurately.
I am currently studying for Microsoft SC-100, the Cybersecurity Architect exam.
Its architectural focus connects naturally with work I already do: identity, device management, Zero Trust, information protection, operational risk and technical decision-making. I am preparing for the exam; I do not present the credential as already earned.
My wider learning has included coursework and hands-on practice in cybersecurity, ethical hacking, Azure security, firewalls and incident investigation. I value formal study, but I also believe a meaningful portfolio should show what someone has actually configured, troubleshot, designed and learned.
Education: National Senior Certificate (Matric), 2010. Languages: fluent English and Afrikaans.