BAUKE-JAN DAVIDS

It started at age seven — pulling apart old computers to see what was inside, then figuring out how to put them back together again. Nobody taught me to do that. I just needed to know how things worked.

That curiosity never left. Through school I kept tinkering on the side, building my own machines, experimenting with whatever hardware I could get my hands on. I chose to study Network & System Administration at Noorderpoort not because someone pointed me there, but because it was the natural next step for someone who was already living and breathing IT outside of school hours.

My first real job after graduating was at Inter-Psy as a workplace administrator. I managed Windows Server infrastructure, rolled out office locations, and somewhere along the way got my first real taste of MDM — deploying VMware AirWatch and experimenting with Autopilot. That spark turned into something bigger.

In 2021 I joined RSE Telecom & ICT, and the scope expanded fast. We onboarded our second AVD customer around the time I joined, and from there I went deep: designing Azure environments, planning identity architecture, building Intune MDM rollouts for Windows, Android and Apple devices, architecting FortiGate networks, and using our Microsoft partnership budget to test and build things that genuinely benefit our customers. More recently I have been leading our push into email security — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS, DNSSEC — turning it into a proper service offering.

I still do not know everything. I learn something new in almost every project. That is the point of this blog — to share what I find in the field: the wins, the workarounds, the scripts that saved an afternoon, and the rabbit holes that turned into deep dives. If someone early in their career reads a post here and it saves them hours of frustration, that is exactly what I was going for.