About Me

In my professional life I wear/have worn many hats: Engineer/Developer, Architect, Consultant/SME and others. I work in and across many different disciplines, of which the most common are:

• Platform/Infrastructure Engineering
• CI/CD Pipeline Engineering
• All Things Cloud
• Security Engineering
• Test Automation
• Metrics/Monitoring/Alerting/Observability
• (Systems) Architecture

But I’ve worked in and am interested in many areas of tech that do not fit easily in these sorts of “Role” categories; the most accurate description I can give is necessarily rather imprecise:

• My customers are typically (internal) Software Engineering teams.
• I find ways to use my experience/knowledge/skills to help them develop/run the software that they want to build/run - enabling them to do what they’re good at: creating software that delights the user/customer.
• Much of my day-to-day is: ask questions that help avoid problems (and sometimes I provide possible answers to those questions).

I hope that gives some useful context to those who are interested in reading the sort of material that I publish here.

About this site’s content

My main¹ purpose for creating this content is “Writing to Learn”; writing helps me to think clearly, to better understand the material and my own opinions/thought process. I gain additional value by having a body of content that I can point others to instead of (possibly poorly) re-writing every time someone asks me about a prior topic.

Therefore:

• The principal target audiences are: me and future me. Of course, I’d like to think that others might get benefit from this effort as well. But I try to write for my audience. Caveat Lector².
• I do not use LLMs, etc. to generate content for me; that would obviate much of my purpose.
• No Ads; that includes “guest content”. Please don’t ask, it’s just a waste of your time.

Disclaimer

While I have taken effort to verify that any information that is presented here as factual is actually factually correct at the time of writing, the information has (mostly) not been checked/edited by anyone other than me. I explicitly disclaim responsibility for any consequences of your choice to make decisions or take action based on anything I have published here. For details, see the License: CC-BY-SA.

Other notes

1. In most of the (tech) material here, I generally presume:

   • Some exposure to networking protocols and concepts, especially HTTP and DNS
   • Some exposure to linux/unix-like systems
   • Basic terminal/cli skills
   • Basic text editor skills
   • Basic familiarity with Version Control Systems(VCS) especially git and “code forge” software such as github, gitlab, forgejo, etc.

2. When you see capitalized forms such as “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, etc., I’m using the approach of RFC2219 which establishes language conventions to indicate levels of “required-ness”.

3. In sections that represent cli input/output or code snippets:

   • The <carets> indicate tokens to be substituted by actual values.
   • The [brackets] indicate optional parameters.

Other Resources I like

I mention some as options to increase background/context, some as reference/tutorial.

• Laws Of Software and the books referenced there as classics.
• Beej’s Guide to Networking Concepts³
• Mozilla’s overview of HTTP

About this site

Here is a list of some software, written by not-me, that I’ve used to make/publish this website:

• Hugo, static site generator
• Hextra(Hugo Theme)
• GitHub Pages
• GitHub Actions

More details available at How this Site was Made

Appearance

As someone uncomfortably aware of my poor understanding of how to design beautiful websites⁴, I’ll say here that I will gratefully receive constructive criticism from those who are willing to put their effort into helping me improve the design.

My fontstack choices are simple:

• Serif: Vollkorn, Linux Libertine. While both are free/libre, using the SIL Open Font License, I generally prefer the feel of Vollkorn, but Linux Libertine is more comprehensive as well as more prevalent. The CSS falls back to other serif typefaces.
• Sans-Serif:
• Header/Decorative: TBD?