From red team to blue team—my experience earning the HTB Certified Defensive Security Analyst certification and learning to think like a defender.
About Me
I have lived in several countries, integrating with varied people and mindsets. My focus lies on security architecture and secure software delivery, attempting to find pragmatic ways of securing complex environments.
I have a hands-on background in CI/CD security, infrastructure automation, and operational security. During the night, I dive into side projects — from homelabs to capture-the-flag challenges.
Skills
Security
Tech Stack
Soft Skills
Languages
Certifications
Side Projects
Resume
Experience
05/2025 — Present
Cybersecurity Architect
Splynter · Antwerp, Belgium- Setting up and improving security standards based on DORA and NIST-SP 800-53
- Head security assessor for projects such as Instant Payments, Ticketing system integrations, Windows 11 Rolout, PAM, CoPilot
- Creating re-usable security patterns for consistent and secure software delivery
- Developed and taught courses on safe usage of agentic AI
- Security lead in projects requiring communication in Dutch, English and French
09/2023 — 05/2025
Integration Consultant
Solita · Leuven, Belgium- Documentation and training of DevOps engineers on integration platform tools
- Built & improved CI/CD tooling including deployment, staging, testing, monitoring & logging
- Extended code scanning to detect vulnerabilities and enforce best practices
- Part of a task force improving system performance, decreasing real-time APIs by 30–60%
- Developed automatic iPaaS deployment using Terraform and Bash scripting
07/2022
Internship
Solita · Leuven, Belgium- Combining Security & Integration by creating a capture-the-flag game based on OWASP Top 10 2020
07/2021 — 10/2021
Backend Developer
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Redesigned and re-implemented architecture from the ground up based on business requirements
- Adapted MySQL database & Python to containerized Flask back-end
- Use of Docker for reproducibility and ease of branching
09/2020 — 02/2021
DRAMA Teaching Assistant
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Teaching Assistant for DRAMA — a Dutch version of machine code using a decimal numbering system instead of binary
Education
2011 — 2023
MEng Computer Science · Security
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Software engineering, system architecture, requirements engineering
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning
- Secure software using state automatons, buffer overflows and basic C exploits
- Thesis around pseudoanonymisation within distributed file saving architecture, compliant with the GDPR
2018 — 2021
Bachelor in Computer Science
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Mathematical foundations: automata, logic, programming paradigms
- Software life-cycle, design patterns, data structures, algorithm complexity
- Bachelor thesis: recommender system for students using SKLearn ML
2013 — 2017
High School
Liceo Lugano 1 · Lugano, Switzerland- Physics & the application of Mathematics
- Course on Informatics, exploring cyber abilities
Blog Posts
Repurposing an old laptop to encrypt my data at rest and host ProxMox to deploy VMs/Containers, all managed via Terraform.
The shortcuts, references, and DNS tweaks I used to get a custom-domain GitHub Pages site online in a weekend.
How Billbuddy moved from a tucked-away home lab to a carefully exposed service with hardened edges.