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 came with DOS. Thirty megabytes of disk space — unless I ran DRVSPACE, which could compress it to an impressive 122 MB. Slow as a slug, 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 pavement by its previous owner. I carried it home. It worked, but I had no software. Then a teacher gave me a few floppy disks with Linux on them. I owe him more than he probably knows.
After that I did what you do when you have hardware but 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 had my first job and my first apartment, the first thing I bought was a box of SuSE Linux 6.0. It was hard. I switched to Mandrake for a while and never quite got on with it. But I kept going.
Years later, when I got serious about my IT career, I adopted Ubuntu because it was popular and it worked — the package manager especially. It took 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 fuzzy, the hardware long gone, but the conviction remains: free software isn’t a preference. For someone who couldn’t afford the established way of acquiring software — and this was before Red Hat made open source professional and enterprise — 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 unblock the printer.” Big companies, mostly one-to-two-year contracts, the kind of places that treat people like numbers on a spreadsheet.
Then, through various turns of fate, I found myself unemployed in front of a job posting from a local hosting company. I applied. They turned me down.
Most people give up after the hundredth rejection. I was living from unemployment benefit to benefit — just enough to keep my head above water — but I believed in that job. So instead of moving on, I called them back and said: “Look — if the position 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 in their office.
It was hard. There was a lot I didn’t know. But all those years of free software — 80% of the time reading documentation, 10% executing, 5% breaking things, and that remaining 5% success, repeat — had given me something no certificate could: the ability to figure things out when the documentation stops. The Arch Wiki alone is a goldmine of knowledge. Debian taught me the rest.
That hosting company — a small local outfit in the city where I lived then, since absorbed by a larger one — is where everything changed. That’s where I discovered Puppet — when it was brand new, version 2.x, before Hiera even existed — and fell in love with the idea that infrastructure could be written as code: versioned, tested, reproducible. Then I discovered Serverspec, and the idea that you could test infrastructure the same way you test software, and it blew my thinking wide open.
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 last — and every step was built alongside 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, well-presented, respectful of the person on the other side of the table. It’s a value I was given, and one I apply to everything: the code I deliver, 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 dedication to infrastructure that behaves. The green text on a black screen. The git log without merge conflicts. The monitoring dashboard at 3am.
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 that’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 of polishing discarded hardware, soldering new capacitors onto blown circuit boards, and booting it again. My production servers are over 10 years old and still running. Good hardware doesn’t age out — it just needs someone stubborn enough to keep it alive.
Transparency is non-negotiable.
Every line of code I deliver is public. Every AI contribution to my products is disclosed — via 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 extras. This is the minimum. When I deliver work, you should be able to trust it without having to check.
Honest advice over comfortable answers.
Tell the client what serves their interests, 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.
AI Transparency
I use AI tools — primarily Claude Code — to build NeatNerds software and write content like this page. I’m transparent about it because you deserve to know what was human and what wasn’t. Every AI contribution is tracked via commit trailers, provenance files, and SPDX headers. Every AI output is reviewed by a human before it’s published. The AI helps; I decide.
How I Work
I don’t work for a title or a department. I work with you, toward a goal I can defend. That means when I’m sitting at your table, I’m not there to validate decisions that have already been made. I’m there to help you make better ones. I’m critical by nature and by conviction. If your timeline is unrealistic, I’ll say so. If your architecture won’t survive its first real load, I’ll say so. Not because I want to be difficult — but because my job is to make your mission succeed, not to make the next meeting pleasant. I show up prepared. I show up well-presented. 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
| Legal entity | NeatNerds BV |
| Location | Herbeumont, Wallonia, Belgium |
| KBO/BCE | BE 1014.727.589 |
| Founded by | Hugo Antonio Sepulveda Manriquez |
| Contact | query@neatnerds.be |
| Data protection | dpo@neatnerds.be |
| Source code | gitlab.neatnerds.be — self-hosted |
Supporting open-source development
All NeatNerds products are free and open source. Building and maintaining them takes time — time that could otherwise be spent on billable consultancy work. If you find value in what I build and want to contribute to keeping 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 to this account are not tax-deductible under current Belgian tax law. I am working on establishing a separate non-profit structure (VZW/ASBL) specifically for receiving donations. Until then, every contribution goes directly toward keeping operations running so I can keep building free software. No marketing budgets, no office rent, no middle management. Just a person, a terminal, and the conviction that this work matters.