Why Start a Blog
I am not exaggerating when I say that I have been staring at this page for “quite a while”.
Starting a blog seems easy, but for someone like me that tends to overthink everything, it feels a lot harder than I thought it would.
So, my goal for this post is going to be not to overthink things and just get out why I am doing this and what I hope will come from it.
A Little About Me
Here is the short version of my story…
I have bounced around tech for the last 15 years or so, but it was never my first choice.
I was meant to be an architect. At least that was the plan… I even posted in my applications to all of the local universities(or so I thought) with the intention of one day building peoples dream homes and maybe something bigger one day.
To my chagrin, I had failed to fill out an important section of the application forms, and my dreams of becoming an architect at the time were dashed.
Queue the best friend, currently studying I.T. at a local College, who ended up exposing me to everything that he had been doing over the course of the next year.
Fast forward 15 years and I am in the middle of a somewhat successful career in I.T.
I am eternally grateful to the people who first hired me, and to my luck for placing me at companies that have exposed me to so much, as well as all of the fantastic engineers that I have worked with, and even followed.
Why Start a Blog
It’s not like I have an infinite amount of time, and the more I stare at this page, the more daunting it seems.
Do I post this without any content on my page at all, do I wait until I have something to share first, and do I feel confident enough to share this on LinkedIN to my network. It’s a big commitment, and maybe a little embarrassment if I start and never do anything meaningful.
This blog is for me, more than anything else.
Over the last few years I have been working in that rapidly evolving space of “Observability”, where nothing ever stays fixed, new tools appear constantly, and the need to expand and grow is constant.
It has been a period of immense growth for me both personally and professionally. I am now a senior engineer in my field at a company more than 2000 people strong, and the buck now stops with me when it comes to the lifecycle of our observability platforms.
Over the last ten years I have been the lead in evolving our observability platforms, currently
- Splunk. Both for Logging and SIEM
- Elasticsearch. You know, for search!
- Grafana LGTM Stack. This is new to me in the last year, but showing more and more promise as time goes by.
These have grown from simple virtual machines in the beginning to almost petabyte level systems running on top of distributed hybrid containerisation platforms on premise and in the cloud.
I have learned so much, and I think I want to share some of it.
So… What do I want from this blog?
I want to share interesting things about the field I have come to love. That’s pretty much it.
And as I share, I am hoping to grow my level of expertise by forcing myself to research the platforms that I work on, making myself better in the process.
Wrapping it Up
My skills lean towards the platform engineering side of Observability.
That is to say, I don’t much care what you do with the platforms and tools, but I do care that they perform extremely well, are highly available, as well as cost effective. Within my team… I care that they are simple, scalable, repeatable and monitored effectively…and quiet; I am old enough now that the monetary value of a Pagerduty call is outweighed by a good nights sleep.
If these are your interests as well, feel free to reach out to me on any of my social accounts linked at the top of this page if you want to talk about anything interesting.
“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.” – Guy Kawasaki
I don’t have a single blog post yet, well… aside from this one, but I hope to look back on this post one day and smile at how it all started.
Wish me luck!