Hey, I’m Wesly 👋
I’m a DevOps Engineer based in The Netherlands with over 20 years of hands-on IT experience, and right now is the most interesting stretch of that career. Most of that is because of what AI is doing to the work, and I’d rather figure that out by doing it than by reading trend pieces about it.
I’m figuring out what AI actually means for the way we build, deploy, automate, and work. This blog is how I make sense of it, in public, with the people doing the same work.
The Journey
I didn’t start in DevOps. I started the way most engineers do: keeping things running.
Back in 2001, I was a printer/IT engineer at OSN Nederland, managing server environments, Terminal Services, and Citrix setups. One environment at a time, one problem at a time. I learned that reliable infrastructure isn’t glamorous. It’s just essential.
Over the following decade at Nalta Consultancy and Fujitsu, I went deep into Virtual Desktop Environments. I became a specialist in Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and workspace management platforms like Ivanti and RES. By the time I left Fujitsu as a Senior IT Expert and Tech Lead, I had designed and delivered Citrix and VDI environments for dozens of enterprise customers across the Netherlands, and I had developed a deep hunger for automation.
Because every manual process I touched made me think the same thing: there has to be a better way.
At RIVM (the Dutch National Institute for Public Health) and through Detron IT Consultants, I put that conviction into practice. I built PowerShell automation that eliminated repetitive Ivanti workspace tasks, created fully automated Windows default profile scripts, and documented script repositories that teams actually used.
Then came RawWorks, and everything changed.
For the first time, I stepped fully into a DevOps and cloud automation role. Docker, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Python, Linux, Azure DevOps, AWS. I went from consuming these technologies to shipping with them daily. I worked on Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and cloud-native pipelines. I built APIs and Citrix MicroApps that won Citrix Hackathon awards. I even started building Arduino-powered smart home components on weekends, just because code is addictive when it actually does something.
That journey led me to my current role at Nationale-Nederlanden, where I work as a DevOps Engineer in the Virtual Workspace Platform team. We run fully automated Citrix Cloud DaaS environments, deliver hybrid cloud VDI pools to multiple business units, and continuously improve the pipelines that keep it all moving. Stack includes Azure DevOps, Terraform, PowerShell, and Git.
What AI is actually doing to this work
I have GitHub Copilot in VS Code every day, and Ollama running in my home lab. One recent example: I used Copilot to compare 40 minutes of forensic VDI log data against a clean baseline and found a root cause I probably wouldn’t have caught by hand. That’s the kind of shift I’m trying to document here: what changes when you add AI to a real infrastructure job with real constraints.
Most of what gets written about AI is either marketing copy or academic theory. This blog is neither.
What You’ll Find Here
Most posts land in a few overlapping areas.
AI is the newest and fastest-moving: practical use of LLMs, local AI with Ollama, Copilot as an investigation tool, and prompt engineering that actually produces something useful.
DevOps and Cloud is the day job: Azure DevOps, Terraform, Git, CI/CD, and the infrastructure decisions that either hold up under load or don’t.
Automation runs through everything I’ve ever done. PowerShell, Python, API integrations, scripting away whatever it takes to stop doing the same thing twice.
Virtual Desktop Environments is my specialty area. Citrix Cloud DaaS, FSLogix, ControlUp, VDI architecture. The unglamorous but critical layer that most enterprises can’t do without.
Get in Touch
Found something useful? Have a question or want to connect?