Wow, three and a half years since my last public post.
I’d like to put the blame firmly on the door of the recent (and sadly ongoing) pandemic, but the site had stalled way before that.
It has, however been a busy three years with changes in jobs, skills and general outlook on things.
This site has stood idle and a little unloved throughout that time – my home lab has been rebuilt a couple of times, scrapped completely, then put back together in a kind of super low power, minimal viable product.
Some of the things I covered a few years ago, especially the DIY servers and NAS boxes, have faded into obscurity or obsolescence, and to be honest, I’m ok with that. I’ll keep them around for nostalgia and I’ll migrate the older posts into an archive.
My own technical skills have changed a lot since that last post and I now have a much stronger focus on IT Management, IT Ops and Security – and the future content of this site will reflect that..
Lets give this website a reboot, a spruce up and a fresh outlook..
Here’s a few of my aims, certainly over the next year or so of this website:
I’m old enough to have learned html in college using notepad, and it was a hideous experience. About 10 years ago I discovered a new fancy web framework called Wordpress and it was a game changer. I’ve built, and continue to support quite a number of websites built using Wordpress over the years and it’s still very much my go-to for client sites simply due to the ease of editing and content additions.
All is not plain sailing as over the years Wordpress has suffered from bloat, increased complexity, significant speed and security issues and a whole SaaS industry has spun up to support it. For this site, I’m doing it a little differently. After playing around with Hugo and other static site generators i’ve settled on Jekyll with the site being hosted on Github.
It also gives me a practical opportunity to learn Github, VSCode and other DevOps style technology.
This is a totally different approach to other sites I’ve built over the years, let’s see how it goes.
As mentioned before, i’ve used html and Wordpress for years and am very confortable using both. However the current Wordpress Gutenberg editor is very manual and “clicky”. Markdown seems to be a better way of implementing formatting within web pages and i’ve been looking for a practical application for this. I fully intend on using markdown wherever I can on this site.
I’ve spent nearly all of my career on the traditional, corporate side of IT, and for the most part the Dev world has passed me by as I’m not a coder. Git (and Github) has also passed me by somewhat. However Github is an amazing resource for IT Pros, regardless of your field or specialism.
I fully plan on using GitHub more in my daily ITOps life, and this will be a good way to document that.
As mentioned before, I’m spending some time learning DevOps style tech such as Docker and Kubernetes. I’ve played with docker before (and my development setup for this very site is running in a docker container) but only really from scripts others have created. I’ll like a deep dive into how it works and its practical applications in my day to day job. This is the same with Kubernetes.
Cheers.