============================================================================== ARJEN PRINS IT & workplace support - and running the systems behind it. Vienna, Austria ============================================================================== Email arjen@prins.at GitHub https://github.com/allyrwastaken LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjen-prins-1909b78a/ Spatzi https://spatzi.app ABOUT ============================================================================== IT and workplace support is where I started, and where I want to go back to. Right now I work as a Site Reliability Engineer and Agile Master at Allianz Technology in Vienna. I'm Dutch, I moved here in 2019, and I've worked in IT since 2017. Most of my work has been about running systems, not building them. I started at Tilaa, a Dutch hosting provider, where the servers you look after belong to customers and they call you when something breaks. After that I ran the systems and the network for a company, then I took over monitoring for a platform, and now I'm responsible for keeping that platform running. Monitoring is where I learned the most. Adding more checks and dashboards is easy. The harder question is which failure would really cause a problem, and whether your check would tell you in time. In my own time I build and run Spatzi : a Hetzner server with Docker, a self-hosted transit routing engine, self-hosted map tiles and Overpass, with Cloudflare in front. I built it on my own and I keep it running. I like the boring parts of the job. A deployment that is boring because someone made it boring. A runbook that is short because the problem got fixed instead of only written down. What I'm looking for -------------------- The years in between are not lost time, they are what I bring with me. From monitoring, site reliability and working as an agile master I learned to look at what is behind the ticket. Fix the thing that keeps coming back, add a check so you see it earlier, and write it down so the next person doesn't have to ask. Improvement is what drives me. What I miss is being close to the people who use the systems, instead of only seeing a ticket number. So: workplace IT, a service desk, or an internal IT team, where helping people is the job and not a distraction from it. SKILLS ============================================================================== Workplace & end-user IT ----------------------- - Support & troubleshooting - from first line to root cause, for colleagues and for customers - Service desk tooling - ServiceNow, TOPdesk, Zendesk - Active Directory - users, groups and access - Hardware & software - setting up and configuring laptops, desktops and the software on them - Office networks & workplaces - keeping the places people actually work in running - Backup & data security - writing the procedures and checking they are really followed - Knowledge bases & documentation - so the next person can find the answer themselves Platforms --------- - Windows and Windows Server - workplace, endpoint and server support - macOS - endpoint support and administration - Linux - Debian/Ubuntu servers, networking, hardening Reliability & monitoring ------------------------ - Monitoring - Dynatrace. Building checks around what would really cause a problem, not around what is easy to graph - Root-cause analysis - from customer support at a hosting provider to platform incidents - Site reliability engineering - keeping a platform available, and handling incidents when it isn't - Patching & maintenance - patching processes that lower the risk, not just close the ticket Ways of working --------------- - Servant leadership - taking blockers, unclear questions and interruptions away from the team - Agile / Scrum - Professional Scrum Master I. Running the ceremonies and the improvements for a platform team - Working across teams - agreeing goals and deliverables with people who don't report to me - AI-assisted engineering - I use Claude Code every day. Most of Spatzi was built with it, including the parts I have to keep running - Teaching - built and gave a cybercrime workshop for police cadets Cloud & infrastructure ---------------------- - AWS - cloud computing and hosted infrastructure - Kubernetes - keeping clusters running as part of a large shared platform - Docker & Docker Compose - production stacks with several services - Cloudflare - Workers, DNS, WAF, caching, origin protection - Hetzner - bare-metal and cloud servers, storage, backups I run these myself for Spatzi : MOTIS transit routing, Overpass API, PMTiles map tiles and glyphs, OSRM. Each one replaced something I would otherwise have to pay for, or a licence I didn't want to depend on. Languages --------- - Dutch - native - English - fluent - German - upper-intermediate (B2) CERTIFICATIONS ============================================================================== - Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) - Scrum.org, November 2023 - verify - SVPB - Private Investigation / Law - Stichting Vakexamens voor de Particuliere Beveiligingsorganisaties, 2017 EDUCATION ============================================================================== IT Forensics / Digital Investigation ------------------------------------ Zadkine - Rotterdam, Netherlands - 2012 - 2017 OFF THE CLOCK ============================================================================== Age: 36 I play games, and with the help of AI, some of them turned into a side project. It's the same thing I do at work: if something annoys me twice, I'd rather spend an evening fixing it than get used to it. I also like to cook, I'm big on music - from kpop to the heaviest of metals, and I love my cat Dimitri. Dutch, in Vienna since 2019 and absolutely loving it :) CONTACT ============================================================================== Email is the fastest way to reach me. - Email - arjen@prins.at - GitHub - github.com/allyrwastaken - LinkedIn - linkedin.com I'm based in Vienna, Austria. Open to remote and to on-site in Vienna. If you'd rather not use a browser: curl -sL arjen.prins.at/cv.txt ============================================================================== EXPERIENCE ============================================================================== Site Reliability Engineer / Agile Master ---------------------------------------- Allianz Technology - Vienna - August 2023 - present I'm responsible for keeping an IT platform running at Allianz Technology, and for making sure it gets better over time. The platform is over 100 Kubernetes clusters, shared with other products. My team manages the ones for a few countries. - Responsible for the platform staying available: the monitoring, and what happens when something breaks - Improved and hardened the monitoring - Since our platform was big and shared with other products, we needed to make sure we would only receive alerts for the things that mattered to us, and not the clusters or products that we didn't own - Reduced the noise between stakeholders and the team - fewer unclear and conflicting requests reaching the engineers, and clearer agreements going back - Rebuilt the on-call setup and rotation from scratch - I ran the sessions and we designed it together with the team, instead of handing them a rota someone else made - Work as a servant leader: my job is to take away what blocks the team, not to tell them what to build - The person the team comes to with questions, about the platform and about the process around it - Run the agile ceremonies and the continuous improvement Monitoring Specialist --------------------- Allianz Technology - Vienna - February 2021 - August 2023 Responsible for monitoring and system performance for the platform. Dynatrace was new in the company at that time, so a large part of the job was helping other teams get started with it. - Built and extended the monitoring in Dynatrace, so we found problems earlier instead of only reacting to alerts - Analysed logs and performance data to find patterns, and turned them into concrete suggestions instead of dashboards nobody looks at - Helped other teams roll out monitoring across their services, and taught them how to use Dynatrace - Wrote and maintained the documentation for the monitoring, so the setup still makes sense when I'm not there System Administrator / Workplace Support ---------------------------------------- Dodax / myWorld - Vienna - June 2019 - January 2021 Ran the company's systems and network across three offices, and the workplace IT that everyone else depended on. - Managed and maintained the company's computers and network - Watched system performance and did the upgrades and patching to keep it healthy - Installed and configured hardware and software - Responsible for backups and data security. We had to restore from backup now and then, so I knew they actually worked - Kept the office network and the workplaces running, and handled support and troubleshooting Junior Linux SysAdmin / Support Engineer ---------------------------------------- Tilaa - Woerden, Netherlands - November 2017 - February 2019 My first Linux job, at a Dutch hosting provider. The servers belong to customers, so when something goes wrong you are the one who has to fix it. - Installed, configured and maintained Linux and Windows servers - Built server patching and maintenance processes that reduced vulnerabilities - Configured, monitored and tuned server performance to keep things available - Worked to a one hour SLA on tickets - Did root-cause analysis on customer problems and fed the results back as product improvements - Built and maintained a knowledge base that cut down repeat questions, although a part of the job was still pointing people to it - Part of the support desk for ~10,000 customers, with three people Guest Teacher - Cybercrime -------------------------- Police Academy - Eindhoven, Netherlands - July 2014 - August 2014 - Created and gave a cybercrime workshop for a class of around 20 police cadets, covering social engineering, phishing and similar topics they would run into in their work ============================================================================== PROJECTS ============================================================================== Spatzi ------ Self-directed project - spatzi.app - 2026 - present A live day planner for Vienna. It doesn't only list sights, it plans your day with real departure times, the weather, opening hours, and a route that changes when your day changes. I built it on my own and I run it in production, which is why it's here: it shows I can set up a whole stack and keep it running, instead of owning one part of someone else's. Infrastructure - Hetzner server with Docker: Express API, self-hosted MOTIS transit routing, Beszel monitoring - Cloudflare in front - Workers, DNS, caching, origin protection - Self-hosted map tiles and Overpass API, instead of paying a provider or depending on a public one with rate limits Engineering - React Native (Expo) app, around 1000 translation keys in English and German - Transit routing with a buffer for catching your train, so it won't show you one you can't reach in time - Offline mode: data is cached so the app still works without a connection, with a clear offline message instead of pretending everything is fine The failure I looked for Routing uses a self-hosted MOTIS instance with a public transit schedule feed. The interesting part is how that fails: when the feed gets old, nothing crashes. The process keeps running, the endpoint still answers with 200, and the app keeps sending people to departures that don't exist anymore. A normal check would stay green the whole time. Meanwhile someone waits on a platform for a train that isn't coming, and the licence for the feed has a penalty for serving routes from expired data. So the check doesn't ask if the service is running. /health/transit asks if the data is still valid, using the validity window of the feed itself, and it warns while there is still time to do something. It goes to my monitoring, so it reaches me instead of a dashboard nobody looks at. I'd rather show this than an outage, because the outage didn't happen. StoppingPower ------------- Self-directed project - stoppingpower.io - 2026 - present Weapon maths for Star Citizen. Pick a weapon and see damage, shots to kill and time to kill for every armour class and body part, then try attachments and crafting quality and watch the numbers change. Static site: no backend, no accounts, no tracking. The interesting part is what happens when the game gets patched. The whole site is generated data, and generated data gets old without telling you: a weapon is rebalanced, the site keeps showing last month's numbers, and nothing looks broken. Same problem as the transit feed in Spatzi. So the pipeline stops instead of guessing: - The data is generated from datamined game files, and the build stops if its own consistency checks fail, instead of publishing something that looks fine but is wrong - After a patch it's one command, and it prints a change report with every change in damage, shots to kill, fire rate, attachments and materials. Nothing goes live before I've read it - The datamining tool is forked, so the pipeline keeps working if the original one disappears User reports go to a separate public repo instead of an inbox, so the report and the fix are in the same place. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Generated from arjen.prins.at - same source as the web version.