About

About Me

In my professional life I wear/have worn many “hats” (Engineer/Developer, Architect, Consultant/SME) and work in various different subdisciplines, of which the most common are:

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

But I’ve done and am interested in many areas of tech work 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 build/run the software that they build.

Now I admit that’s a bit vague, but I hope it gives some useful context to those who are techie (or techie-adjacent) enough to be interested in reading the sort of material that I’m likely to publish here.

About this site’s content

My main1 purpose for creating this content is “Writing to Learn”; writing helps me to think [more] clearly, to better understand the material and my own opinions/thought process. 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.

Other notes

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

    • 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.
    • some exposure to networking concepts, especially HTTP and DNS

  2. When you see capitalized forms such as “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, etc., I’m using terminology from RFC2219 which establishes language around requirement levels.

  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

About this site

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

More details available at How this Site was Made

  1. Additional benefits (to me) include: a single process for publishing my writing and a canonical destination/location so I can more easily rediscover information/thoughts I’ve sort of forgotten about: “oh I know I worked with/wrote about foo before, where did I put that?”. ↩︎

  2. Not to be confused with Beej’s Guide to Network Programming , which is about socket programming ↩︎