About me

I’m Mischa. I’ve worked across various fields ranging from project management in the oil industry to health care, but my driving passion has always been IT. Fascinated since childhood, I’ve always passionately worked on projects that leveraged computers and automation to reach my goals.

In 2007 I started learning to code to automate the video games I used to play and to build my own websites. In 2014 I taught myself to use Linux and utilized these skills to run large-scale video game and social media automation projects to drive traffic to the websites I coded at night. I lived in Norway for 9 years, and when I moved back home to the Netherlands, I succeeded in following my dream and turning my passion into my career, and I’ve been working as a full-time DevOps Engineer since 2021.

I fell completely in love with Kubernetes the first time I used it, and I am obessed with learning as much about Kubernetes as possible and sharing it with my audience. I passionately believe that the future of software deployment lies in containers and I specialize in building platforms and environments that allow efficient deployment and maintenance of containerized workloads.

I’m in love with my work. After I finish my day’s work, I usually sit down to study more about my field. There is always something new to learn. Learning can take many forms. Very often I read or watch videos and courses and take notes. But you cannot learn everything from the books alone. You also need to learn by doing. I work on coding projects or building my Kubernetes home lab. I created a lab repo where I store all the files I use to explore these topics.

I also run an extensive Kubernetes homelab which I document on my YouTube channel and all GitOps code can be found in this repo

In 2024 I was awared the Microsoft MVP title for my efforts of sharing knowledge with the community.

Appearances

Podcasts

Azure Cloud Recruiting Simplified: Serverless, Kubernetes, and the Buzz with Mischa van den Burg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvcv4TVJwP0

Favorites

These articles came out particularly well, and might provide some value to you, or help you get to know me a little better.

Living On The Command Line

I’m a nerd. I use neovim for all of my text editing. I have a fully customized setup with dozens of custom keybindings so I can work a little more effectively, and this blog is entirely written on the command line using vim.

I love UNIX based operating systems and I’ve built my custom setup in Arch Linux. I wrote an article about how customizing and maintaining my tailored operating system is a creative activity to me.

In the words of Rob Muhlenstein, “Using the Linux Bash terminal command-line is coding. Every command you type on every line is part of an interactive, ongoing program interpreted by Bash and processed by Linux.” Having this dialogue with the computer through commands is one of the most fascinating things on this earth to me, and I feel fortunate that I can work with this every day as a DevOps engineer.

About This Website

When I changed my career to DevOps, I started this blog to document the journey I was embarking on. I’ve been sharing my notes on this blog and started writing articles about the stuff I was learning, and found it to be a very enjoyable practice.

My style is a mixture of micro-blogging where I share useful things and tricks I learn and long-form articles which are more refined.

Why bother with a personal website? Why not just write on social media?

This post captures it beautifully.

Why Take Notes?

“Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.”

Tiago Forte, Building A Second Brain

In the modern age we consume very large amounts of information, much more than we can remember. It is therefore very important to manage your intake of information, but also the retention of that information. I find that taking notes on the topics that may be of interest to me at any given time helps me understand the subject much better, because it forces me to clearly formulate my thoughts and convert them to written form.

When I want to reflect on a certain topic or to write an article, I go through my collection of notes and link them together. Very often I find that the creation of these links will stimulate even more new connections and associations, and I end up with new ideas for even more topics of study or things that I want to write about. I use my Zettelkasten as a vehicle for reflection, learning and creativity.

Many of these notes are avaialble in my public Zettelkasten,

Code

If you’re curious about the writing and publishing process of this blog, see this note.

You can find the source code of the blog at github.com/mischavandenburg/blog, and the contents of the zettelkasten are hosted in the zet directory at /blog/content/zet/