About me

My name is Henk Boelman. I live in Driebergen, the Netherlands with my wife and 3 sons.

A few things about me

I work as a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I got rewarded as Microsoft AI MVP and Umbraco MVP. I'm a online instructor for a Cloud Guru. I founded the Global AI Bootcamp and Global AI Night. I run 3 usergroups: Azure Thursday, AI Night and Dutch Umbraco Usergroup. I gave more then 40 talks the past year.

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A bit of history about me

My first encounter with computers was around my 6th seeing my dad busy evening after evening behind magical black and green screens. I could just be there sitting behind typing “dir, dir, dir” and see the letters going over the screen.

It got a bit more serious around my 12th when my dad gave me his old 386SX laptop. It ran on DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 and all the popular games like Command and Conquer, Warcraft and Doom. Around that same time the internet arrived at my door and with a 14k4 modem and the unforgettable sounds that Trumpet Winsock could produce from the modem the first websites loaded in Netscape navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 2.

At high-school I found other people also getting interest in computers and soon PC/Cyber parties where born. Here we could play computergames all day and night, after we found the broken terminator in our coax network, this sometimes could take a few hours.

After that, thing evolved fast and at my 16th I was working in a computershop assembling and configuring home computers, learning basic and pascal aside.

Roughly 20 years later I’ve learned to create software and I’m still hooked on the internet. After getting my MCSE and updating a lot of machines for the millenniumbug I slowly moved from the system administration side to web development. I ran my own web-company for a long time, but gave up to get involved in bigger projects. For the last 7 years I have been working for large companies like Mirabeau and Ordina involved at large development projects.

Microsoft Azure AI

My current focus is centred around Microsoft Azure AI. I develop cloud (AI) application, lead development teams and implementing Continuous Delivery flows, to release more, faster and without service interruption.

Besides that I love write for my blog, prototype and explore new technologies (IOT, AI and cognitive services), give/create workshops and talk on conferences.

Communitues

I'm lead several communities:

  • Azure Thursday, a monthly usergroup on Azure related topics
  • DUUG, The Dutch Umbraco Usergroup
  • Global AI Night, A global Meetup twice a year on AI all over the world.
  • Global AI Bootcamp, A global day of learning about AI taking place once a year all over the world.

Contact me

Incase, you want to get in touch, you can contact me through: Twitter LinkedIn.