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Simon Gielen

Second-year ACS student at ThomasMore, Belgium.
Working toward cloud and systems engineering -
built up from scratch, through the failures.

View projects My story
Cloud Linux Networking Infrastructure Security
Portrait of Simon Gielen
Based in Belgium, aiming international
Year 2nd ACS
Focus Cloud · Infra
School ThomasMore
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Cloud Engineering ◆ Linux Systems Administration ◆ Infrastructure & Networking ◆ AWS · EC2 · VPC ◆ Containerization & Orchestration ◆ Network Security ◆ Windows Server ◆ ThomasMore Belgium ◆

The opening

I didn't arrive here knowing what I was doing.

I started Applied Computer Science with a general interest in technology and no clear picture of where it would take me. The first semester was a mix of exposure to things I'd never touched: web basics, networking fundamentals, and server concepts. It slowly became clear that I wanted to understand systems at a level where I could actually control and change them.

That realization took some time. It came from building things that broke, reading errors I didn't understand yet, and gradually working through them. The infrastructure side of the field started to click in a way that the surface-level stuff didn't.

Read the full story →
Gym

Showing up consistently, making small progress, not quitting when it's uncomfortable. That's the same discipline I bring to technical learning.

Cars

I'm drawn to understanding how mechanical systems work, not just that they do. The same curiosity applies to infrastructure.

Neuroscience

How learning actually sticks. How habits form. These questions matter practically; understanding the mechanism makes you better at the process.

Where I landed

Cloud and systems engineering is the direction.

Not web development as a destination. Not chasing frameworks. The infrastructure layer is where my attention ended up after two years of hands-on exposure to the full stack of what ACS teaches: how systems are deployed, secured, connected, and kept running.

Skills & background →
Cloud compute & hosting AWS EC2, networking, deployment, Elastic IP
Linux systems Server admin, CLI, permissions, services, logs
Network security Firewalls, access control, TLS, SSH hardening
Containerization Docker fundamentals, deployment architecture

What I built

Projects

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01 Infrastructure
AWS · Nginx · HTTPS

Cloud-hosted web server

Full deployment on AWS EC2: provisioning, reverse proxy, TLS, and SSH hardening. Built from scratch via CLI.

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02 IoT · Hardware
MQTT · Orange Pi · Sensors

IoT thermostat system

Hardware + software integration: temperature sensing, MQTT messaging, cloud dashboarding, and transistor-based control.

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03 SKIL2, Sem 2
Linux · Docker · Shell

Linux infrastructure lab

Service management, Docker containerization, and network-level diagnostics in a structured lab environment.

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