about

making this space my

personal webpage

I learned how to crash my first web server in 2000. I was trying to be helpful by updating and publishing a FAQ page in my spare time. In retrospect, it was above my helpdesk skillset. There was nothing in the A+ computer tech course that said I could bring down the whole Apache cluster. What even is that?

Well fortunately, I did it often enough that the sysadmins figured out how to trace the anomalous activity back to me. Well, not really. I wanted to add some gifs that weren’t allowed and asked them for help. It was easy, they said, do this… and they crashed the server. Oops.

I had been teaching myself HTML in between helpdesk calls while my cubicle buddies played minesweeper. I say that without judgement. I was very bad at minesweeper. And although I knew how to build a pc from components, and login to a remote server to manually create an email account for a new employee, there was so much more I didn’t know. Fail fast, I guess.

After that job (no, I didn’t get fired), I maintained a couple more internal websites as a desktop technician and network field engineer. But by then I was employed in healthcare IT where our commercial application code was owned by vendors. I grew into a business analyst role, drifting further away from terminals, command lines, and text editors.

here i am

In the twenty-something years since my start in information technology, I almost forgot the alternating boot up sounds of the floppy and hard drives or the rigor of changing daily tape backup drives in that chilly data center across the hall from the morgue. I work in the cloud now. I can deploy infrastructure as code. Not that I do, but I know what that means and I could do it if I had to.

I haven’t had senior and engineer in my job title since 2014, but here I am, putting those online git tutorials to use. I still get a little nervous that I’ll crash a web server but then I remember that mine are running in self healing containers now and we only use phrases like loadbalancing clusters ironically.

I stopped trying to keep up with web development when HTML and CSS were the only skills a blogger needed. Until, that is, I wondered how hard it could be to edit and host my own site again. It’s not not hard. New terms to learn, languages to navigate and architectures that have evolved into entirely different shapes and sizes.

All this to say, I made this with templates. I forked, I cloned, I copied and pasted. You can do the same with my repo, but you’re so much better off if you start where I did.

For a few years I subscribed to A Cloud Guru, now part of Pluralsight, to learn everything I could, on demand, about cloud technologies. Recently, I replaced that subscription with premium youtube and some patreon instructors. Coding isn’t my strength, but in the way that learning it connects me to the content I publish, it’s like cooking, and other basic life skills.

Clearly I could go on. I’ll stop instead and wish you luck on your journey. Make web content or get cloud certified. Go you! Thanks for reading this far.