Where it started

I have been thinking back to the beginning of my career. At the time I do not think I realized what I would be doing professionally. I just wanted to do what I enjoyed. I was not thinking about making a living or marketable skills. I just know that building tiny websites with HTML and CSS was fun. I was not particularly good at it, I was just tinkering. At some point along the way I did try to turn my focus towards building web development into a business. This was mid-late nineties. I was still a philosophy student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and working as a News Editor for the student publication The Kaleidoscope. I remember some of the tools used, Quark Express, all MacIntosh PCs and servers. We used a paper board for the layout to model before entering the editor. That is what went to print. I delivered the papers as well. I was not very dependable at any of these responsibilities. But the thing I enjoyed was building the pages that were posted on the web version of the paper.

Moving along

I did not stick with web development. Who knows what could have been. There have been times over the years that I have dabbled a bit here and there both at work and home for various purposes, self-hosted blogs, or inner office wikis. But my journey took me down the SysOps path. A truly rewarding career full of opportunities to sandbox and build and tinker with all the new hardware and tech that has come along over the last 25 years in this vast information technology ocean. I have built massive storage systems, robotic tape libraries, virtual clusters, hyperconverged solutions all so much fun, challenging work, but exciting. There is a dark side as well. I have consolidated a lot of people out of work, including myself. Those layoffs post VMware adoption, entire server rooms scaled down to one rack. Fantastic job, we will not be needing your services any longer. Workforce reduction. It was meant to be though, always something better, something new at the next stop. Well, not always. There were a couple moves along that way that felt like time travel to the past. Operating systems 10 years over EoL. Patches so far out of date there was no incremental upgrade path. Data on JBODs with failing disks all over the array. The experience was needed to appreciate the good times and to learn what bad systems management looked like.

Where things are going

The thing is, what I am trying to say, I have come full circle in some ways. The necessity to learn coding is becoming unavoidable. Increasingly, the projects I am interested in require a deeper understanding of scripting or programming. PowerShell, for automation and integration in Windows systems and in Azure. Shell scripting while standing up a Linux infrastructure. Python for building a personal LLM. HTML, JS, CSS, Markdown for my web pages. I am constantly at the command line now. Working on some project for some interest whether personal or professional. In the past, I may have been able to avoid the need by utilizing some GUI driven tool, a crutch. Now, I do not even want to find a way around it. The only way out is through.

Here I am

So, I have been building my system. A collection of tools and set of processes that I can leverage to achieve my goals. Visual Studio Code, GitHub Codespaces, Cloudflare Pages and various frameworks like Jekyll, Asto, Hugo, Next.js. These are my tools and my workshop. My Canvas and Brushes. I am creating things I enjoy, that I love. I forgot what it felt like to stand up a web page and watch it change and improve over time. That vision in your mind, becoming reality. I am creating assets. Currently, I am full of positive energy and pouring that into the world. I cannot wait to see what I can create next.