I'm Liviu – the person behind I mean IT.
Short version
I'm a freelance infrastructure engineer focused on automation and DevOps practices based in Enschede. I help businesses in Twente and the wider Netherlands run reliable, well-documented IT infrastructure – from small office networks to production-grade automation pipelines.
I started I mean IT in 2024 after several years of hands-on engineering roles, because I wanted to bring enterprise-level thinking to small and medium businesses without the enterprise price tag.
Longer version
I grew up taking things apart to see how they worked, which is the honest origin story of most people who end up in this field. I found my way into IT properly in my early twenties, first as the sole IT engineer at a 300-machine medical facility in Romania – where "sole IT engineer" meant networking, server maintenance, user support, hardware repairs, backups, and everything in between, all of it on me. There is no faster way to learn infrastructure than being the only person responsible for keeping it running.
I moved to the Netherlands in 2022 and joined ZT Systems in Almelo as a Quality Control Engineer, working on enterprise server hardware during development and NPI (New Product Introduction) processes. I progressed from QCE to Staff Trainer, then Line Lead, ultimately moving into the newly formed Failure Analysis Engineering department, working closely with engineering and operational leadership. The work involved diagnosing failures on systems destined for hyperscaler datacenters – the kind of hardware most engineers never get hands-on experience with. Alongside the diagnostics work, I built the team's Confluence knowledge base from near-zero into a structured technical reference, because I noticed nobody else was going to.
Both of those roles taught me the same lesson from different angles: good infrastructure isn't about having the fanciest tools, it's about being thorough, documenting what you do, and not creating problems for the next person who has to touch the system. That's the philosophy I bring to every project at I mean IT.
What I actually do
I focus on the parts of IT that small and medium businesses tend to struggle with most:
- Infrastructure design and migration – Proxmox, Docker, VMware, hybrid setups
- Network automation – Ansible-based config management for routers, switches, and firewalls
- Monitoring and observability – systems that actually alert you before things break (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Uptime Kuma)
- CI/CD and DevOps – Git-based workflows, pipeline automation, infrastructure as code
- Sysadmin and Linux – the day-to-day plumbing that keeps everything running
- Documentation and handover – because the work isn't done until someone else can understand it
I focus specifically on infrastructure and systems engineering. For areas like Microsoft 365, design, or end-user support, I’ll usually point you to someone who specializes in that.
My homelab is my lab
A lot of what I know in detail, I apply and still learn by running it at home. My personal infrastructure currently includes 40+ self-hosted services across a Proxmox cluster – media, productivity, monitoring, authentication, networking, the works – all standardized into a reproducible Docker Compose template pattern, with a planned migration to Kubernetes (k3s) underway. It's been running continuously since 2023 through two full stack migrations.
This isn't just a hobby – it's how I stay sharp on technologies before recommending them to clients. If I'm going to suggest you put Authentik in front of your apps, it's because I've been running it for two years and know exactly what breaks and how to fix it.
Some of this work is documented as case studies on this site. (Coming soon – I'm in the process of writing them up properly.)
Working language
I work in English by default. My Dutch is at A2 level and improving – sufficient for everyday situations, but for technical discussions and written deliverables I'll switch to English. This works well for most Dutch tech companies, where English is already the working language internally.
Outside of work
Outside the keyboard, I build and play electric guitars (two so far, one more on the way), shoot film and digital photography, cook, read philosophy, and tinker with cars. I think being curious about more than one thing makes you better at any single thing – including engineering.
Let's talk
If you've got an infrastructure problem, a project that needs a second pair of expert hands, or you just want to chat about a technical challenge – I'd love to hear from you.
[email protected] • +31 6 16 89 33 68 • LinkedIn