Hello World!
My name is Pascal Van Acker and I am a Site Reliability Engineer and technology enthusiast from Belgium. Like many, my journey started early as a teenager. I spent my time building computers, a bit of programming (mainly web-design and PHP back then) and creating video games (using RPG Maker 2000).
I am a father of two, a husband and a technology enthusiast who enjoys working on his home lab, tinkering with electronics, hiking, making music, watching a movie with my family or friends and playing the occasional game of chess or video game.
You can find me on Github or LinkedIn .
Professional Life
My journey in IT began at a call center for an Internet Service Provider, where I somehow managed to stay sane for two years. During that time, I briefly escaped phone support by developing an internal sales tracking tool in PHP.
In 2011, I transitioned into a role as a Linux System Administrator and IT Support Assistant. I was responsible for managing the Linux infrastructure, Cisco networking, server hardware installations and hardware purchases. This role provided hands-on experience with shell scripting, various Linux distributions (Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux), and automation using Puppet. For virtualization, I worked extensively with Oracle VirtualBox on the command line, using it both for server environments and to provide our embedded Linux developers with dedicated workstations. On top of that we were running a cluster of 40 workload machines for continuous integration and testing. I also started playing around with containers to make some proof of concepts for improvements here. After more than five years in this role, I sought a greater challenge and moved into Site Reliability Engineering.
In March 2017, I began my career as a Site Reliability Engineer and I haven’t looked back since. I joined a small company of about 30 people, with an SRE team of four (myself included). Over the years, while working with an amazing team, I have gained extensive knowledge in automation, cloud infrastructure, micro-services and distributed systems, working with tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes and ArgoCD to streamline deployments, enhance system resilience, and reduce operational overhead. I learned to use cloud native monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki and Tempo alongside the ELK and EFK stack. On top of that I strengthened my programming skills in Python and Go by writing various scripts, custom applications and patching open source projects for our needs. Beyond my technical contributions, I have taken on roles as both a career coach and team coach, mentoring colleagues and helping the professional growth of our engineering teams. Helping others navigate their career paths and support their personal growth is something I deeply enjoy, and I take pride in seeing my colleagues grow into confident, capable engineers.
Going forward, I am sure I will remain passionate about technology, eager to learn new things and tackle new challenges.