I'm Alan Berger, based in Sandhurst, Berkshire, United Kingdom. I've spent over two decades working in information technology, not because I fell into it, but because I've always been genuinely fascinated by how systems work, how they fail, and how to make them better. That curiosity hasn't dimmed.
I'm largely self-taught. Most of what I know has come from doing things properly, breaking things in a safe and controlled manner, and working out exactly why something broke. I find that more valuable than any purely theoretical path, there's no substitute for having actually debugged a production issue at 2am with packet captures and a deadline.
My career has covered a wide range of disciplines: server builds and RAID configuration, operations, virtualisation with VMware and Hyper-V, network design and management, and multi-site Active Directory environments. I've handled everything from structured cabling and hardware procurement through to DNS, Group Policy, Exchange administration, and backup systems, often as the sole IT person responsible for keeping it all running.
On the networking side, I have hands-on experience with VLANs, firewalls, OpenVPN and IPsec tunnels, 802.1X port-based security via FreeRADIUS, TLS certificate infrastructure, and IDS/IPS deployment. Security isn't an afterthought for me, it's baked into how I approach every design.
More recently I've worked in cloud-focused roles, providing 3rd line support across Microsoft 365, Azure, and broader enterprise cloud infrastructure in managed service environments. I've also spent time in application support roles that involved PHP debugging, MySQL data, syslog and packet capture analysis, and Linux production environments.
Scripting and automation have always been part of how I work. I'm comfortable in PowerShell, Bash, Python, and PHP, and I believe that if you find yourself doing the same thing manually more than a couple of times, you're probably doing it wrong.
I take documentation seriously, not as a box-ticking exercise, but because good documentation is what separates an environment that runs on institutional knowledge from one that can actually be maintained, audited, and handed over. I've written IT policies, operational runbooks, process guides, and incident records throughout my career, and I think that discipline matters.
I'm familiar with ITIL principles, and I've worked across both Agile and Waterfall delivery. I try not to be dogmatic about methodology, what matters is whether the work gets done well, with clear communication and a genuine understanding of the risk involved.
I believe in Secure by Design as a principle, not just a checklist. Whether it's implementing LAPS to eliminate lateral movement risk, hardening a Linux guest with SELinux, or making sure credentials are stored in the right place rather than the convenient one, getting security right from the start is always less painful than retrofitting it later.
I run a home lab environment that gives me the freedom to experiment with technologies and approaches I want to understand properly rather than just theoretically. It's also where I build and maintain my own projects, you can find those on the Apps page.
I'm a long-time listener of Security Now with Steve Gibson, one of the few podcasts where I consistently feel like I'm learning something concrete every episode.
Beyond the technical, I'm drawn to epistemology and the philosophy of knowledge: why people believe what they believe, how to distinguish genuine reasoning from motivated reasoning, and what intellectual honesty actually looks like under pressure. These feel like increasingly important questions.
When I'm not doing something technical, I'm probably playing something that rewards patience and depth over spectacle. My two favourite genres are first-person shooters and real-time strategy, and if a game manages to combine both, I'm completely sold. Battlezone was doing exactly that in the late nineties and it still holds a special place for that reason.
On the FPS side I've put serious time into Hell Let Loose, along with the Bohemia Interactive lineage; Operation Flashpoint through to the ARMA series. All of them sit in the same space: mil-sims where communication and coordination matter far more than reflexes, and where doing something tactically correct feels more satisfying than a flashy kill. On the strategy side, Beyond All Reason, the Civilization series, Stellaris, X3: Terran Conflict, and Elite Dangerous all have a permanent place in my library. I'm drawn to games with systems deep enough that you're still discovering things hundreds of hours in. Terraria falls into that category too, it looks like a simple platformer and is absolutely not.
I also have a lot of affection for classic LucasArts point-and-click adventures. The Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle hold up remarkably well, and there's something satisfying about going back and finishing them properly.
This is my own corner of the internet. No tracking, no advertising, no analytics feeding someone else's platform. The randomised quotes you'll find on my index page, from Einstein, Tesla, Asimov, and others, aren't decoration. They reflect how I try to engage with the world: with curiosity, scepticism, and respect for people who pushed understanding forward.
My code is on GitHub if you're interested.
"The most important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." — Albert Einstein