Darren van den Berg

I am Darren van den Berg, 30 years old and based in Purmerend. My background is in Business IT & Management. I like working where technology, process and people meet: close enough to the technical details to understand what is happening, but always focused on making something usable.

During my studies I worked a lot with stakeholder management, ITIL and governance. What stayed with me most is the value of asking better questions. The first request is often not the real problem. Once the actual need is clear, the solution becomes much easier to judge.

Outside work I still spend plenty of time on technology. At home I run a Proxmox environment with multiple servers, a 10GbE network, my own backups and self-hosted services. I like building systems myself, understanding them properly and keeping them under control. Privacy and ownership of my own data are a big part of that.

Hobbies

Gaming has been a steady hobby for years. I am drawn to games with a strong atmosphere and a story that stays with you afterwards. Persona 5 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are good examples. I also still have a soft spot for older games such as ROSE Online and RuneScape, and recently I have spent quite a bit of time with Path of Exile 2. I also enjoy films where the visuals and story really work together, such as Shutter Island, Interstellar and Parasite.

I also like to travel. I have been to Japan twice and Iceland twice. Japan appeals to me because of the culture, the food and the way everyday things work just a little differently from home. Iceland is almost the opposite: empty, rough and sometimes wildly inconvenient because of the weather. That is part of why I like it. I have been through snowstorms there with gusts of up to 150 km/h; not comfortable, but hard to forget.