Hi, I’m Dennis van den Waardenburg

I break things on purpose, figure out why they broke, and then write about it here so I can pretend it was intentional all along. Welcome to my corner of the internet where curiosity meets beer and questionable late-night infrastructure decisions. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a master’s degree in Data Driven Design.

The stuff I can’t stop tinkering with

  • Software Engineering – I design systems, build backends, and chase down that last millisecond of latency like it owes me money. API patterns, developer tooling, performance tuning, if it makes software better (or at least less painful), I’m into it. I think abstract, cut through complexity fast, and focus on what actually matters: does the end user get a result that works, or did we just build a cathedral nobody asked for.
  • Machine Learning – Not the flashy demo part. I’m in the trenches with MLOps, model serving, training pipelines, and all the plumbing that makes ML actually survive contact with production.
  • Artificial Intelligence – Building it, hosting it, poking it with a stick to see what happens. My goal is making AI solve real problems.
  • Home Labbing – I self-host everything, and have convinced myself that my office is basically a small data center. My electricity bill disagrees.
  • DevOps and Infrastructure – CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, podman and docker wrangling, observability stacks, and the noble art of automating myself out of doing the same thing twice. Cloud agnostic by principle, I’d rather build on open-source tools than lock myself into whatever a big tech vendor decided to rename this quarter.

The lab – a.k.a. “the setup”

People tell me it’s overpowered. I tell them it’s barely enough. Here’s what I’m running as of May 2026 (this will absolutely change, because I have zero self-control).

Gaming PC

Mostly collects dust, honestly. Fires up for gaming sessions and then goes right back to sleep. Runs Windows 11 (I know, I know), powered by an AMD 7945HX, 64GB of memory, an nVidia 4070 Super, and 2x2TB SSDs.

Workstation

This is where the real work happens. Same hardware as the gaming rig, but running CachyOS because life’s too short for Windows. Rocking an AMD RX 4060XT for local AI inference, it’s not a data center GPU yet, but it gets the job done. Allows me to experiment a lot.

Laptop

An ASUS Zenbook with an Intel U9 185H, 32GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD on btrfs. The OLED screen at 2440x1800 is gorgeous enough to make you forget you’re staring at terminal output. Perfect travel buddy. Also runs CachyOS, because consistency matters.

Hypervisor

A Minisforum N5 loaded with 92GB of memory, 2x2TB ZFS OS disks, and 5x18TB disks for data. Proxmox runs the show with a fleet of VMs and LXC containers. This thing never sleeps, 24/7 up.

Network

Full Ubiquiti stack, running 10Gbit everywhere because why wouldn’t you. Every device is hardwired at 10Gbit, except for a few legacy holdouts and Wi-Fi access points. Multiple VLANs keep everything properly segmented, because flat networks are for people who enjoy chaos.

So why does this blog exist?

Honestly? Writing forces me to actually understand what I just spent three hours debugging. If a post happens to save you from the same headache, that’s a bonus. If not, at least future-Dennis will have something to reference instead of re-learning the same lesson for the third time.

One heads up: I skip the basics. You won’t find me explaining what a for-loop is. But I will walk you through why a design choice caught fire in production, or how to hunt down a bug that only appears when Mercury is in retrograde. If that sounds like your kind of read, stick around.

A very small disclaimer

Everything on this blog is mine; my opinions, my experiences, my questionable decisions at 2 AM. None of it represents my employer, my clients, or anyone else unfortunate enough to be associated with me professionally (wink, wink).