About me

The about me page, the author of the michaelwaterman.nl technology blog. So my name is Michael Waterman, but I guess you could have figured out my name just by visiting this blog . I was born on August 15 in the year 1974. My childhood took place in the south of the Netherlands in a place called Eindhoven. During these early years I grew up watching TV shows like “Fun Factory” on Sky Channel, with cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats and one of my greater passions, Star Wars. My first ever movie in the cinema was “Return of the Jedi” back in 1983. I already owned many of the toys, but never seen the movie on the big screen. That viewing made a profound impact for the rest of my life, especially the scene on Endor with the Speeder Bike chase. How cool would it be to do that in real life!

It so happened that during those years I got my first computer. I must have been around ten or eleven when my dad, who had worked his entire life at Philips, got me my first computer. This amazing machine was a Philips VideoPac G7000, and it got me hooked into the digital world. I remember playing lots and lots of games on that machine. Over the years I had a few other brands like the now famous MSX, MSX2 and the Amiga 500, I guess the latter must have been around 1992. It wasn’t until 1994 that I got my first personal computer. If I remember correctly, it was a Compaq Presario CDS 942 running at a staggering 90 Mhz. When I bought it, it was running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups but I upgraded it to Windows 95 the next year. During that year I also surfed the web for the first time. Still on a very slow modem compared to these days high speed connections, but what a revelation that was! Jumping websites with Netscape Navigator Gold, moving from country to country in an instance, and vividly remembering the first phone bill afterwards (auch). In 1995 I started my IT education after getting out of the armed forces. I studied for 3 years until I got my first IT job at a company named Origin in 1998, this company would later be know as AtosOrigin.

During my many years in IT I started out as a service desk person and worked my way up at the same company to become a technical architect, specializing in Windows endpoints (we simply called them clients at that time). After 7 years of working at the same place I wanted to try something completely different, just to see if I could do it. I found my way into the storage world for some time, but it just wasn’t my type of technology. During that time NetApp (The storage company) held the annual meeting in Houston, Texas and one of the guys from leadership said: “If you don’t have the passion for storage, than perhaps this is not the company for you”. Looking back, I suspect he was a Sith Lord dealing in absolutes. Joking aside, this was my wake-up call realizing that I, in my heart, was more a Microsoft person. Just a little while later I applied for a job at Microsoft and so it happened that on June first, 2007, I took on the role of infrastructure consultant at Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and afterwards, once I found my way into security, as senior engineer Cybersecurity. I stayed at Microsoft for 9 years. Looking back, I can honestly say that, from a technology point of view, this was the best job ever!

One major downside of working internationally is the travel involved, or to put it differently, being away from home so much. Especially being alone in a hotel room during the evening is brutal. You tend to get into working so much that it isn’t fun anymore. So with much pain in my heart I left Microsoft after 9 years.

I just wanted something else, a bit closer to home instead of traveling throughout the world. Just by chance I guess I was contacted by a recruiter from Philips if I would be interested in a security engineer job at a newly formed business unit named, Philips Digital Pathology Solutions. So it was that after a long run at Microsoft I joined Philips in June of 2016. I stayed at this place for 2,5 years until I was so bored. The promises that were made in the beginning never came about and from a technology standpoint it was so so. The challenge I had at Microsoft, the innovation, just wasn’t there.

On September first 2018 I joined a local MSSP with a focus on the SMB market, currently in the role of Architect with a specialization in security but an opinion on everything else. Over the years I’ve developed services that include a security assessment based on my experiences placed within the scope of the CIS framework. We’ve jointly created vulnerability management, SOC and SIEM services. Still there’s a lot to achieve in this sector as the awareness of what could happen still falls behind on where it should be.

Having a long career in IT I’ve worked with lots of operating systems, servers, clients, application, services and Cloud. Although I’m a security minded person I can get enthusiastic about many IT technology aspects. People always tell me that I’m not the typical techy but more a people person. What I really enjoy doing is being on stage and telling people how stuff actually works, but to be honest I also like to dig into the bits and bytes every now and then.

Volunteering for charity

Right and there’s my hobby! I started this post saying that I’m a nerd at heart, loving toys from the past and having Star Wars as a hobby. Well, in 2017 I joined a global team of volunteers that dress up in Star Wars costumes, that team is called the 501st legion, specifically the local subsidiary named the Dutch Garrison.

We support charity organizations with a strong focus on childern by being present at organized events and try to bring a smile on everyone’s faces. It’s funny really when you think about it. Just being dressed up in a piece of plastic can mean so much for somebody else. Our costumes are movie accurate, which means that they have to be compliant with our costume reference library. This library is filled with information about the color, fabric and exact layout of the costume, just as they are in the Movies. At the moment of writing this I’ve got two costumes, well actually three, but the third is a Spider-Man costume (told you I was a nerd). For the 501st I portray as a Biker Scout from “Return of the Jedi” and I’ve also got a Imperial staff officer from “A New Hope”. Really cool to be able to live out your childhood fantasy and at the same time do something good for society.