Edwin de Jong
Lead DevOps Engineer | Game Developer | Homelab Architect | Boardgame Fanatic
Sand i Vestfold, Norway
About Me
I'm a Lead DevOps Engineer at Kongsberg Discovery AS, based in Sand i Vestfold, Norway. I've been building, breaking, and fixing things in tech for over a decade — from hosting community forums and game servers as a teenager to architecting enterprise-grade infrastructure at scale.
At home, I run a full homelab with four Proxmox servers, a 7-node Talos Kubernetes cluster, and a network architecture I'm genuinely proud of. It's where I learn, experiment, and push things until they break — then figure out why. Every layer of the stack teaches something different, and I like understanding systems from the inside out.
I'm also the lead developer of Ugaris — an open-source MMORPG I've been building since 2014. It's the game I played as a child, and the place where I met my wife. It's not a side project for a resume; it's the project that gave my life meaning, and it still drives me every day.
Whether it's infrastructure, game servers, or a dusty C codebase that stores quest states as raw memory dumps — if it's complex and interesting, I'm probably already working on it.
Professional Experience
Lead DevOps Engineer | Kongsberg Discovery AS
April 2025 - Present | Horten, Norway (Hybrid)
- Spearheading the modernization of CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps, authoring exemplary pipeline definitions that set the standard for build, test, and deployment workflows across the organization.
- Leading large-scale Azure infrastructure migration initiatives, ensuring seamless transitions with minimal disruption to production systems.
- Administering and optimizing Azure DevOps environments — including project governance, branch policies, service connections, and variable groups — establishing best practices for repository management and pipeline orchestration.
- Authoring Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Ansible targeting Azure, standardizing provisioning and enabling reproducible, auditable deployments across landing zones and subscriptions.
- Designing and implementing Azure-based platform architecture, leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Registry, and Azure Monitor to build resilient, scalable infrastructure.
- Coaching and mentoring engineers in leveraging LLMs for daily software engineering — including OpenCode, GitHub Copilot, and Agents.md-driven development workflows — accelerating development velocity and fostering a culture of AI-augmented engineering across Azure DevOps pipelines and beyond.
DevOps Engineer | Nord Pool AS
October 2022 - March 2025 | Oslo, Norway (Hybrid)
- Spearheaded migration of infrastructure between Azure Intune environments, minimizing downtime and ensuring seamless service transitions.
- Developed and maintained Terraform IaC for Azure, optimizing resource provisioning and reducing manual intervention.
- Enhanced security measures by implementing hardened CIS images via Ansible, contributing to the overall security framework within Azure.
- Contributed to the development of Landing Zones, bolstering security and compliance.
- Negotiated and secured favorable vendor contracts, achieving significant cost savings while maintaining service quality.
- Provided 24/7 infrastructure support and incident management through on-call rotations, ensuring high availability.
Senior Software Engineer | Tappin AS
May 2019 - October 2022 | Oslo, Norway
- Transitioned from Senior Software Engineer to sole Technical Lead, managing all technical operations.
- Led the complete system overhaul from outdated PHP versions, significantly improving performance and security.
- Designed, developed, and maintained a high-traffic online event management platform with features like chat, voting, and speaker management.
- Recruited, trained, and mentored a new technical team, fostering collaboration and improving productivity.
- Sole technical responsibility for maintaining a large legacy application and modernizing key components.
Skills & Technologies
Infrastructure & Cloud
- Azure
- Azure DevOps
- Azure Kubernetes Service
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Kubernetes
- Proxmox
- Cloudflare
CI/CD & Automation
- Azure Pipelines
- GitHub Actions
- ArgoCD
- Docker
Monitoring & Observability
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Azure Monitor
- Loki
Development
- Go
- Python
- C/C++
- JavaScript/TypeScript
- PHP
- SQL
Game Development
- SDL3
- Electron
- MMORPG Architecture
Networking & Security
- VLANs
- VPN
- Firewall Management
- PKI/TLS
Ugaris MMORPG
A decade of passion, code, and community
Ugaris — Evolution of Mercenaries of Astonia
Lead Developer & Project Manager
March 2014 - Present
Ugaris is the game I played as a child. It's where I met my wife. And since 2014, it's been the project that defines my evenings, my weekends, and a significant part of who I am as an engineer.
Originally based on Mercenaries of Astonia by Intent Software, open-sourced by lead developer Daniel Brockhaus, I grabbed the codebase the moment it went public. What started as curiosity — can I even get this thing to compile? — became a decade-long journey of modernization, architecture, and stubborn passion.
This isn't a portfolio piece. It's not about money or fame. Ugaris is the game that gave my life meaning, and everything I've built around it — the infrastructure, the tooling, the community — exists because the game deserves it.
Recent Articles
Building Ugaris: A Decade-Long Journey in Game Development
In 2014, I forked an open-source MMORPG called Mercenaries of Astonia. I played this game as a child. I met my wife on this game. Eleven years later, it's still the project that drives me — here's the story of how a dusty C codebase became a modern containerized platform.
Read more →From Bare Metal to Kubernetes: A Homelab Odyssey
It started with a forum in high school. Then gaming clans needed voice servers. Then a custom ladder system required learning to code. Now it's a full enterprise rack with four Proxmox servers, a 7-node Talos Kubernetes cluster, and VLANs named after Game of Thrones houses. Here's what I learned along the way.
Read more →