About

Obviously, this site is focused on the things I find interesting and useful. As this is mostly a one-man show, that means I decide what shows up here. Which leads to two natural questions:

• What do I think is interesting?
• Who am I?

Interesting

Let’s start with what I find interesting. Actually, that is a fairly wide range of subjects, but my main focus on this site will be related to programming and everything around it. Where everything around it is mostly defined by me, and can change at any time. This means things about programming languages, programming techniques, “DevOpsie” stuff, technology, design, project management, and no doubt will turn out to be a bit broader than these subjects.

Unless otherwise noted, the posts on the site are written by me. Linkpost might go to something written by someone else or to a piece I wrote elsewhere.

About me

My name is Arjen Schwarz and I’m a Dutch guy living in Melbourne, Australia. After travelling around for a while I ended up here and decided to stick around. At the moment I’m enjoying live here and work as Principal Consultant at CMD Solutions (disclaimer: all opinions are my own, and don’t necessarily reflect my employer’s). I am also active in the AWS community, as one of the organizers of the AWS User Group here in Melbourne, as an AWS Ambassador, and as AWS Community Builder. I’ve tried several podcasts, of which so far the User Group’s one has seem to stick. If you want more information about who I am and my travels, you can do so on my travel blog at arjen.eu even though that hasn’t been updated for a very long time.

As for my experience in the matters on this site; since 2005 I’ve been either a developer, DevOps person, project manager or manager of a development team at any one time. I am happy in all of these roles and will always try to learn from anyone I meet. You may notice that a lot of contents concerns AWS, as that is my main focus at work and the community involvement I mentioned before.

Wait, what’s with the photos?

A fair question, as I’ve just explained that this is a DevOps focused site. Why would I put photos of nature here? The TL;DR is simple: because I like it.

The slightly longer version is that I’ve started to get a bit tired of seeing that all the various blogs and sites believe they have to show either the same photos or none at all. Neither option felt attractive to me, so I decided to instead use photos from my time traveling through some of the planet’s most beautiful regions.

If you like it, enjoy the photos.

If you don’t, just read the name of the site.