About me

Hey! My name is Nicky Vermeersch. Ever since I was young, I was fascinated by technology and the working of devices and machines, and I found that I loved to learn discovering how things worked. This was especially true for computers, IT and technological devices.

Today, I volunteer to run several websites where I handle the setup, infrastructure and backend to sustain communities. I also write articles, tutorials and documentation and lend my experience to other people. I mostly spend my time managing Minecraft Middle Earth, a community that I founded in October 2010. It is a collaborative effort about recreating the world of Arda and Aman (universe of Eä), the universe of Lord of the Rings, imagined and designed by J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Histories of Middle-Earth, and novels such as Beowulf. It is home to some very lore-avid people, artsy, tech-wizards and passionate people.

Since we may not generate revenue or profit from intellectual property that is not ours, I decided to handle everything myself by going for a high-performance/low-cost approach. This meant managing everything myself, servers, software licenses, installations, policy creation and enactment, and more. By using consumer-grade hardware I managed to cut expenses by a lot, while still having a pretty powerful system compared to products available on the market.

My focus on IT lies within the area of dedicated servers, websites and web applications and solutions. I also occasionally do coding in Java, C++, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, but not as much as I used to. Hardware specifications and evolution is something I follow-up, as well as privacy related Internet matters.

In my spare time I occupy myself with music, drawing and learning about Information Technology and whatever else that peaks my interest! Though I really like creating and contributing to things on all levels.
I’m also trying to get my degree in Computer Sciences next to working full-time.

I work as a “train traffic surveyor” for Infrabel, a Belgian entity in charge of the Belgian railway infrastructure. Infrabel exploits railways, switches, signals, crossings, catenaries and assigns the capacity allocation. As part of Traffic Management and Services, my job is to optimise our daily traffic to cut delays and avoid congestion and assure the safety of all traffic. In case of emergencies or situations where human intervention is required ( such as stopped trains, traffic interruptions,  infrastructure anomalies, … ) need our intervention and us applying a variety of procedures.