The Nerd Behind the Neat Suit

How free software found me

I didn't choose free software. I needed it.

In 1999, my classmates had Pentium IIs with 3Dfx Voodoo cards. I had an IBM PS/2 286 running MS-DOS 6.22, CorelDraw 1, WordPerfect 1, and the BASIC that shipped with DOS. Thirty megabytes of disk space — unless I ran DRVSPACE, which squeezed it to a whopping 122 MB. Slow as a snail, but it had disk space. It was what my family could afford, and I made it work.

Then I found a 386DX on the street — literally, dumped on the curb by its previous owner. I carried it home. It ran, but I had no software for it. That's when a teacher handed me a few floppy disks with Linux on them. I owe him more than he probably knows.

From there, I did what you do when you have hardware and no money: I went to the public library to use the internet, downloaded what I could, and learned by breaking things and fixing them. When I finally got my first job and my first apartment, the first thing I bought was a boxed copy of SuSE Linux 6.0. It was difficult. I moved to Mandrake for a while and couldn't get the hang of it. But I kept going.

Years later, when I started my IT career properly, I picked up Ubuntu because it was popular and it worked — especially the package manager. It took me a few more years to realise Ubuntu was a derivative of Debian. When I discovered the source, I fell in love with it and never looked back.

That's over 26 years now. The timeline is hazy, the hardware is long gone, but the conviction remains: free software isn't a preference. For someone who couldn't afford the established way of doing software — and this was before Red Hat made open source professional and corporate — free software was the only door that was open. I walked through it, and I've been building on the other side ever since.

From helpdesk to infrastructure

My IT career started in 2007 with the job everyone starts with: first line helpdesk. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" "I'll come over to unjam the printer." Large corporations, mostly one- to two-year contracts, the kind of places that treat people like numbers on a spreadsheet.

Then, through various twists of fate, I found myself unemployed and staring at a job posting for a local hosting company. I applied. They rejected me.

Most people give up after the hundredth rejection. I was living from unemployment cheque to unemployment cheque — barely enough to stay afloat — but I believed in that job. So instead of moving on, I called them back and said: "Listen — if the job is still open next month, let me come in for a week and show you what I can do." A month passed. The posting was still there. I called. The next day I was at their offices.

It was hard. There was a lot I didn't know. But all those years of free software — reading documentation 80% of the time, executing 10%, breaking things 5%, and finally that remaining 5% of success, rinse and repeat — had given me something no certification could: the ability to figure things out when the documentation runs out. The Arch Wiki alone is a knowledge goldmine. Debian taught me the rest.

That hosting company — a small local outfit in the city I lived in at the time, since swallowed up by a larger corporation — is where everything changed. It's where I discovered Puppet — back when it was brand new, version 2.x, before Hiera even existed — and fell in love with the idea that infrastructure could be written like code: versioned, tested, reproducible. Then I discovered Serverspec, and the idea that you could test infrastructure the same way you test software, and my mind was blown.

From there, the path was clear: configuration management, compliance, infrastructure as code, and eventually the AI governance tooling I build today. Every step built on the one before — and every step was built together with free software. Debian, GNU, LibreOffice, Puppet, and the thousands of contributors who made each of them possible.

The Name

There's a story behind the name — but the short version is this:

"Neat" is how I show up. Prepared, presentable, respectful of the person across the table. It's a value I inherited, and one I apply to everything: the code I ship, the infrastructure I build, and yes, the suit I wear to your first meeting.

"Nerds" is the two decades of terminal sessions, configuration management, and an unreasonable commitment to making infrastructure behave. The green text on a black screen. The git log with no merge conflicts. The monitoring dashboard at 3 AM.

Neat suits. Nerd habits. NeatNerds.

What I stand for

Your infrastructure belongs to you.

Not to a vendor, not to a cloud provider, not to whoever holds the API key. I build on free and open-source software because it's the only model where the people who depend on the infrastructure can inspect, modify, and own it. And that infrastructure doesn't need to be new — I come from a background where you dust off discarded hardware, solder new capacitors onto blown boards, and make it boot again. My production servers are over 10 years old and still running. Good hardware doesn't expire — it just needs someone stubborn enough to keep it alive.

Transparency is non-negotiable.

Every line of code I ship is public. Every AI contribution to my products is disclosed — through commit trailers, provenance files, and SPDX headers. If I can't show you how something works, I have no business selling it to you.

Quality is a habit, not a feature.

A clean git log, a green CI pipeline, a well-tested codebase — these aren't nice-to-haves. They're the minimum. When I deliver work, you should be able to trust it without having to double-check it. That's the standard I hold myself to, and it's the standard I held myself to before anyone was paying me to.

Honest counsel over comfortable answers.

Tell the customer what serves their interest, not what they want to hear. If your timeline is unrealistic, I'll say so. If your architecture won't scale, I'll say so. If you're overspending on a problem that has a simpler solution, I'll say so. That's what "consultant" means — someone who gives counsel.

AI Transparency

I use AI tools — primarily Claude Code — to build NeatNerds software and to write content like this page. I'm transparent about it because I believe you deserve to know what was human and what wasn't.

Every AI contribution is tracked through commit trailers, provenance files, and SPDX headers. Every AI output is reviewed by a human before it ships. The AI helps; I decide.

This isn't a disclaimer — it's a commitment. For the full story on why I believe AI transparency matters and how I enforce it, see the transparency page.

How I Work

I don't work for a title or a department. I work with you, toward a goal I can stand behind.

That means when I sit at your table, I'm not there to validate decisions that have already been made. I'm there to help you make better ones. Sometimes that's comfortable. Sometimes it's not. But the fact that I'm doing the work alongside you — not handing off a slide deck and disappearing — is how I prove that the mission matters to me as much as it does to you.

I am critical by nature and by choice. If your timeline is unrealistic, I'll say so. If your architecture won't survive its first real-world load, I'll say so. Not because I enjoy being difficult — but because my job is to make your mission succeed, not to make the next meeting feel pleasant. A consultant who only tells you what you want to hear isn't giving counsel — they're selling comfort with an invoice attached.

I show up prepared. I show up presentable. And I show up honest.

If that sounds like the kind of person you want in the room when infrastructure decisions are being made, let's talk.

Company Details

Support Open-Source Development

All NeatNerds products are free and open source. Building and maintaining them takes time — time that could be spent on billable consulting work. If you find value in what I build and want to help keep it going, contributions are welcome.

IBAN: BE22 9735 0519 6747
BIC: ARSPBE22
Reference: "FOSS support"

Transparency disclaimer

NeatNerds BV is a Belgian commercial entity (besloten vennootschap), not a non-profit organisation. Contributions made to this account are not tax-deductible under current Belgian tax law. I include this because you deserve to know exactly where your money goes and what it qualifies as.

I am working toward establishing a dedicated non-profit structure (VZW/ASBL) specifically for receiving donations to support open-source development. When that is in place, tax-deductible giving will become available and this page will be updated accordingly.

Until then, every contribution — regardless of the amount — goes directly toward keeping the lights on so I can keep building free software. I'll be honest with you: I have a mortgage and a family. Open-source development doesn't pay those bills on its own. Your support means I can spend more hours writing code that benefits everyone and fewer hours worrying about whether I can afford to.

No marketing budgets, no office rent, no middle management. Just a person, a terminal, and the conviction that this work matters.