Last weekend this site passed the 25K views mark! Nice to see that people read my blogs and also that I get feedback on them, thank you all 🙂 In this blog post, I would like to tell you about how I got into IT from a young age!

Commodore 64 and Basic

For me, it all started when we got a Commodore 64 at home because we used that at school. I played a lot of games on it and started my course in Basic on that when I was 10 years old. There was training that you could do which was done by an institute nearby, I think it was 7 afternoons of learning and an exam which I passed without any problem 🙂

Primary school and computers

At my primary school, we had a room with computers, Commodore 64 but also a laptop model computer which had the size of a large suitcase and was about 10Kg 🙂 My task was always to turn on those computers and load them with software for the other kids, geography or calculation programs mostly.

Intermediate school

We didn’t have that many computers at my intermediate school, there was a computer club there but I wasn’t a member of that because at that time it looked very nerdy 😉 But I knew I wanted to do some kind of IT education in the future, there was a new class for the secondary school called ‘Technische Informatica’ and I wanted to do that.

Secondary school

And so I started that new class and… I hated it, it was some IT stuff (Programming things in Turbo Pascal 6) but also I had to solder things to a PCB which I didn’t like. I wasn’t good at math also and so halfway through the first year I switched to another school and I completed that one year later. (Medewerker Beheer Informatie Systemen, Information Systems management employee roughly translated) Because I switched halfway, I had a half year left until I could do a new education and I started working to pass the time…

First jobs

I started working for a Dutch insurance company in 1996, Groene Land Verzekeringen, part of Achmea) and… Well, you start earning a lot of money and I could move away from your parent’s home and live together with my girlfriend… Then you don’t think about going back to school 🙂 From there I switched to the central IT Department of Achmea and worked there for about 10 years in different apartments (Servicedesk, Workspace, and Technical Engineer/Security) Learned a lot, did Microsoft Certifications and big projects (Creating the new server infrastructure for Achmea based on Windows 2003 and VMware/HP for example). This is where I started scripting, did a lot of CMD scripts there for deployments, etc.

Switching to being a Consultant

After that, I had a few jobs, mostly 5 years each in which I started using PowerShell and fell in love with that 🙂 After that, I got my first consultancy role at ViaData and did a lot of migration projects there, and started using Endpoint Manager for the first time. I learned a lot there about being a consultant and not an Engineer for your own company. But I wanted bigger customers and so I switched to my current employer NEXXT. I’m a Cloud Consultant now and work on almost everything with the word Microsoft in it 😉 My focus now is primarily on Endpoint Manager, Exchange Online and I’m responsible for our Workplace vision. And I like learning people how to use PowerShell and already did one session about that for my colleagues which they liked a lot 🙂

So that’s my 26 years of IT life in a nutshell, how did you start in IT?