About

I'm Syon Foppen. I live in Enschede and work as a DevOps Engineer.

What I like most is a platform that is boring to operate. Deployments do what you expect, an alert means something is actually wrong, and nobody has to repeat the same manual steps every week. Most platforms don't start out that way. Getting one there is the part of the job I enjoy: automating the work people keep doing by hand, cutting the noise out of monitoring, and making changes safe enough that they stop being an event.

On this blog I write about DevOps: pipelines, infrastructure as code, deployments and monitoring. Azure and my homelab are part of that. The posts cover problems I ran into, the options I looked at, and what I chose and why.

How I got here

I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid. It started with my father's computer parts and slowly turned into programming: small batch scripts first, then mods for GTA V when I was around twelve, and later websites.

I earned my MBO 4 diploma in Application and Media Development, a Dutch vocational program, on an accelerated track in two years. I later started a degree at a university of applied sciences, but left and continued learning through my work as a software engineer. I've always learned best by doing. It's like learning to ride a bike. Reading about it only gets you so far, and you fall off a few times before it works.

As a software engineer I worked mostly in C# and .NET. Over time my work shifted from the application to what it runs on: pipelines, infrastructure, hosting and monitoring. I helped set up a DevOps team and got involved in architecture and platform decisions.

What I've worked on

One project was an email platform for a SaaS product. The old SMTP server didn't support DKIM, so I designed a new platform based on Postfix and OpenDKIM. Customers can now onboard their own sending domains, and the platform handles DKIM signing.

Another was pull request validation in a large monorepo. Every change built all projects, one at a time. I added logic that works out which projects a change affects and validates only those, and made the builds run in parallel. PR validation now takes half as long, so developers get feedback sooner. Having waited on pipelines like that myself, I know what teams need from a platform, and which parts of it they'd rather not think about at all.

These days I work on pipelines, infrastructure and monitoring, including on Azure. I'm most interested in problems where software, infrastructure and security overlap. I hold the AZ-104 certification (Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate), and I'd like to grow towards cloud architecture and consultancy, where the work is about connecting technical choices to what an organization needs.

The homelab

Alongside my work I run a homelab, and that's where most of my falling off happens these days. It runs Proxmox, with Kubernetes on Talos managed through GitOps. I use it to try things I don't run in production, so when something breaks, I'm the only one affected.

Outside work

Away from the keyboard I do photography and 3D printing. I also work as a first aider at events, which is a form of incident response where more is at stake than a failed deployment.

Get in touch

Have a question about a post, spotted a mistake, or solved something differently? Email me at syon@syonfoppen.nl, or find me on GitHub, LinkedIn or Microsoft Learn. New posts are also in the RSS feed.

About this site

This site uses no cookies or third-party trackers and aims to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. The privacy page, the accessibility statement and How I write, which covers how I use AI, have the details. Opinions are my own.