PhD holder and certified cyborg. I enjoy weird food, hiking, and games with a good story. I want to make the world a better place.
I’m a senior researcher at imec and teaching fellow at Ghent University in the IDLab research group in Belgium.
Research
My research is focussed on service orchestration in the cloud, edge and fog.
- Making it easier to deploy and manage complex applications in the cloud and edge.
- Enabling multiple independent parties to collaboratively build and maintain distributed software.
- Simplifying the operations surrounding machine-to-machine communication.
I have experience working on numerous research projects, both national (imec and VLAIO) and international (FP7, Horizon 2020, Grant for the Web), with industry partners, the public sector, and other academic institutions.
See my full publication record on ResearchGate.
Teaching
I give lectures and hands-on labs at Ghent University and UGain on a number of topics such as
- Infrastructure as Code
- Systems Design
- Distributed Data Processing
- OS and network security
- Open Source community and licensing
- Programming in C, C++ and Python.
Community building
I’ve been a board member of Hackerspace.Gent since 2014 and wrote the Hackerspace Blueprint; a booklet about how to run a leaderless organization using do-ocracy. I regularly give talks and workshops about about community building and conflict resolution. I was elected to the Ubuntu Community Council in 2022.
Open Source
I’m a passionate user of and contributor to open source. Some of the stuff I’ve worked on:
- I’m maintaining a bunch of Snap packages including Signal Desktop, Arduino IDE, PhotoScape and Easy OpenVPN Server.
- I contribute to the snapcraft.io ecosystem by writing documentation, blog posts, and PR’s for
snapcraftandsnapd. - I helped kickstart the Ubuntu community theme initiative, although my biggest contribution there might have been suggesting to call it “Yaru”.
- I used to be very active in the Juju community, writing a bunch of Big Data Charms as part of the Tengu Team, writing a bunch of documentation, and helping design the 2.0 version of the
charms.reactiveframework and writing a paper about how cool it is. Had the great pleasure of being appreciated by Jorge Castro and can confirm he is a Chinese botnet. - I answered a bunch of questions on AskUbuntu.
Family
Proud husband of Anne Fonteyn and loving dad of two cats: Simba the floofball and Panda the gooby baby.
