Introduction

Despite having had the domain name for around a decade and a half, there hasn't ever been anything consistent at this site. I've written periodically in various other forums, mostly about personal stuff. But a lot of what I wind up writing is more technical than those venues lend themselves to.

So this is my "geek" space about various topics. While you may occasionally get a cute picture of my son, that's not my goal here. (If you want that, see Facebook.)

Who I am

At heart, I'm a systems guy. I love taking something complex with lots of moving parts, understanding how they function as a whole, and making that whole "work correctly."

As you might guess, that's an interest that can be applied very broadly. I love to discuss personal finance (big fan of YNAB), investing (I'm a Boglehead), the law, and politics. My wife tells me I would have made a really good tax attorney.

And of course, there's hardly a system as complex as computers and the Internet (even if it doesn't have emergent artificial intelligence yet), which led me to Computer Engineering early on, and ultimately landed me a job at Microsoft. After over a decade at Microsoft, I've now started a new adventure at Akamai.

What I do

I was a Program Manager at Microsoft for nearly twelve years. In that time, I'd never actually left my team, but my team's place in the org and my role within it have changed several times. It's always been Windows -- though we've been the Operating System Group or the Windows & Devices Group most recently. And within Windows, always Networking.

I came in at the tail end of Windows Vista. My team was too busy shipping Vista to give me something specific to do, so I started pulling up random bits of the network stack and learning about them. By the time Vista shipped, I knew a little bit about most of it, which made me a perfect fit to work on Network Diagnostics in Windows 7. In Windows 8, I turned my focus to Carrier Provisioning, the Windows Connection Manager, and Wi-Fi Hotspots.

In Windows 8.1, I moved again within my larger group to the Internet Protocols side of the house. I owned a suite of WAN acceleration technology called BranchCache, as well as assisting with the Windows implementation of SPDY, a precursor to HTTP/2. My work on HTTP/2 has continued through the present, both within Microsoft and at the IETF. Through Windows 10, I spent time owning our server implementation (http.sys) and later our client implementations (WinInet and WinHttp).

At the IETF, I've contributed to the HTTP/2 RFCs (you can find me in the Acknowledgements section of RFCs 7540 and 7541) and was the Document Shepherd for RFC 7838 (Alt-Svc). I'm continuing my investment in the web space by working on QUIC as the doc editor for HTTP/3. More on that as the standards work progresses.

My work at the IETF led me to changing jobs to a role that let me invest more in web standards, by joining the Foundry team at Akamai. I'm currently focused primarily on QUIC and HTTP/3, with some other web and security investments as things come up.

Why Belgium, and what's an Évêque?

I got the domain name while I was spending a semester at L'Université Catholique de Louvain. "BE" has a multiple significance to me -- at the time, I was the author of a devotional called "Be Encouraged," and the initials of my parents (and later, my wife) were all "EB". So having the family domain name in .be seemed appropriate, as there is no .eb ccTLD.

An "Évêque" is a (church) bishop, my last name. A "Fou" is a jester, the French name for a chess bishop. As a high school chess player, this seemed doubly appropriate. Put them together, and you get a "crazy Bishop," which isn't that far off either!

(In case you couldn't tell, my love of systems also expresses itself in an over-fondness for multi-layered jokes and double-entendres.)