Special Delivery Manager
Vaucresson, France · Claranet
Looking ahead: Directeur Technique / Directeur de Projet — industrial, energy, or aerospace, at an end-client company
I'm Belgian by birth, and I've been in IT since I got my hands on a Hayes modem at sixteen. I joined Schlumberger in 1993 and worked my way from helpdesk support through Unix and DNS administration, into Perl and LDAP scripting, and eventually into project management — first at Schlumberger, then through Atos and Bull. Along the way I've written more infrastructure scripts than I can count, usually long before "DevOps" was a word anyone used for it. I've also picked up a few stories worth keeping: fixing DNS and Unix issues on an oil rig, and working on remote water-meter reading back when it was still a novelty, not the standard it is today.
Today I'm a Special Delivery Manager at Claranet — and that title isn't a typo. Most SDMs I've worked alongside don't come from a hands-on technical background; I do, and I still code my own infrastructure at home for fun. I also don't switch personalities between a colleague and a client — I'm the same person in both rooms. "Special" felt like the honest word for that combination, not a joke that needs quietly correcting.
Where I'd like to take that next: from ESN back to an end-client, in a Directeur Technique or Directeur de Projet role, owning technical direction and delivery outcomes for one company instead of a portfolio of service accounts. I got a taste of that years ago fixing DNS and Unix issues on an oil rig — being part of what a company actually does, not managing a contract around it — and I'd like more of it.
Homelab projects, designed, built, and shipped for actual daily use.
Self-hosted photo/video/file library consolidating 20+ years of personal media: EXIF-based date routing, PWA share target, rsync offsite sync, file-vault features, backed by a highly-available homelab setup. My favorite build of the bunch.
A Go + Wails desktop app for finding and clearing out duplicate files.
Flask + LDAP + InfluxDB/ApexCharts monitoring dashboard, with a Nagios-fed alert heatmap. Built for and by a homelab enthusiast.
A bookmark, wishlist, and link-tracking app.
Recipes and notes, kept together in one place.
A budget tracker with envelope budgeting and a debt payoff simulator. The first app in this series, and still genuinely useful for reining in spending.
A Kanban-style task board for personal and professional organization.
A file tailer/colorer, ported to Python 3 from the original mtail by Matt Hellige, itself derived in part from colortail-0.3.0 by Joakim Andersson. Public and maintained. View on GitHub