Jan Van Meirvenne

nicknamed ‘Jean Cloud’, I have a knowledge split across the Azure platform, while getting a kick out of modernizing apps, data and identity

About

Hi there!

My name is Jan Van Meirvenne, nicknamed “Jean” (French pronounciation, not the English one :)) by friends and colleagues. I live in little, little Belgium and have big, big fun in making the cloud my playground. An inside joke went too far which transformed my ‘professional’ nickname to ‘Jean Cloud’, referring to my fellow Belgian who showcases his epic splits and kicks on the big screen. Although I am nowhere near as famous or as fit, I do love kicking the tires on the Azure platform, and having a split knowledgebase on all its components.

My career started in 2010 as a system engineer doing infrastructure-focused consultancy for the Microsoft System Center stack. While I started off as an IT Professional, I always had a certain affinity with development related activities.

In my free time, I built small PHP-based websites for local businesses and sports clubs. Professionally, I created several tools, plugins and reports for the System Center platform.

This combination of being able to talk&walk the IT infrastructure concepts and jump over to the ‘other side’ and develop any gaps that where not available out-of-the-box allowed me to define a very hollistic approach for my projects.

Thoughout the years, the balance shifted from predominantly IT infrastructure activities with some development, to really emphasizing the last one and the IT part being a prerequisite job.

In 2016, I left my job as I felt that my shift towards development started to clash with the company’s focus on IT infrastructure projects.

I landed a position at my current employer ‘DexMach’ (then called Inovativ Belgium). It was also a System Center focused company, but was in full transformation to an Azure consultancy oriented organization.

This greatly accelerated my development skills as things like automation, integration and devops activities were deemed a key differentiator.

Today, I am playing the role of Technical architect (and keeping it in balance with my role as a father of 2 at home). T in capital because I perceive myself as a T-profile: somebody with a broad overall Azure knowledge with a deep knowledge on specific areas. Those areas are currently:

  • Application Modernization (how do I get an existing app into Azure and make it as lean and mean as possible)

  • Data Modernization: applying (big) data concepts and platforms to existing and new data workloads

  • Modern Identity: we all know traditional active directory and in-house developed authentication platforms, but how do we get this in the modern cloud computing approach? This is where I assess each scenario and map it to the Azure Active Directory stack’s capabilities.