About me
I'm Syon Foppen, an Azure Cloud Engineer at Arcady, a Dutch IT consultancy based in Zwolle. I live in Enschede. I like platforms that are boring to operate. Deployments do what you expect, an alert means something is wrong, and nobody repeats the same manual steps every week. Getting a platform to that point is the part I enjoy.
From batch scripts to platforms
I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid. It started with playing around with my father's computer parts, and slowly turned into programming. First small batch scripts, then mods for computer games, and later websites.
Professionally, I started out as a software developer, mostly in C# and .NET. Over time my work moved from the application to what it runs on, such as pipelines, infrastructure, hosting and monitoring. I also helped set up a DevOps team and got involved in architecture and platform decisions.
Because I've been the developer waiting on a pipeline myself, I know what teams need from the platform, and which parts of it they would rather never have to think about.
The problems I like most are the ones where software, infrastructure and security overlap. I hold AZ-104, and next I want to move towards cloud architecture and consultancy, where the job is to link technical choices to what an organization needs.
How I learn
I learn by doing. I started a degree at a Dutch university of applied sciences, but learning from textbooks didn't work for me, so I stopped and figured things out as I went. 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.
Most of my falling off happens in my homelab. It runs Proxmox, with Kubernetes on Talos managed through GitOps. I use it for things I don't run in production, so when something crashes, 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.
Why this blog
I write about what I build and what I figure out while building it. Most posts follow the same pattern: the problem I ran into, the options I looked at, and what I chose and why. The topics are Azure networking, identity, infrastructure as code, platform engineering and observability, and now and then something from the homelab. I hope they save you some time in the documentation.
Elsewhere
About this site
This blog is a static site built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare. It uses no cookies and no third-party trackers. Visits are counted with self-hosted, cookieless analytics, as described on the privacy page. The site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 AA; the accessibility statement has the details. I write the posts with help from AI, and How I write explains where it helps and how I check the result. Opinions are my own.