Relaunching My Blog

It is time to combine my two WordPress blogs (one at powershell.getchell.org and the other at ngetchell.com) so I can bring all of my writing in one place. I’ll be importing all the old content into the site. I chose to go with Hugo now that it provides a great writing interface (vscode) and covers all of my needs without all the tinkering I’ve grown to despise from WordPress. My Github Actions are set and publishing is a commit away.

The goal of this is to remove the artificial barriers I’ve placed on myself. See, I’m a procrastinator. If there is blog “housekeeping” to be done, I will do that instead of writing.

For a few years, I hosted the blog using Ghost. There was so much tinkering to do. Is the latest version deployed? Should I build the server completely with Ansible in case of disaster? Should I rebuild and run inside of Docker? All these questions faced me whenever I sat down to write. The whole time I wrote with Ghost, I never once published a new post. With that realization, I decided to migrate to Hugo and drastically simplify.

Beating Back Imposter Syndrome

I’ve been busy since I last posted to the site. My interests have diverged away from just PowerShell as my technical knowledge has expanded. Since beginning the blog back in 2015, I’ve moved into a Systems Administrator position at work after many years doing desktop support. In the education department, I received an Associate’s in Programming, completed my Bachelor’s in Network Administration, and I finished my Master’s in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance. Even I can’t believe it.

Learning has always been very important to me, but completing college didn’t come naturally. I feel like that is a common feeling with men my age, but that is mostly anecdotal. I found the right school for me with Western Governors University. They let me apply my experience to the coursework to accelerate quickly and to take my time on the subjects I wasn’t familiar with.

My degree helped me land an open security analyst position in higher education. It was a brand new position, so building an InfoSec and risk management system was definitely a learning experience.

In 2022, I joined a SaaS company as a DevOps Engineer. My job is to automate everything in sight and make our developers more productive. The role is challenging and I’m learning a ton. I’ve been very lucky in my career and this move is no different.

Our team is rolling out Infrastructure as Code to make deploying our services a snap. We have a complete revamp of our CI/CD process on the roadmap. I can’t wait to dig in on that one.

Software

I’m running the blog on a Digital Ocean droplet running Debian 12. From CMS, Hugo was the obvious choice. Having simple, cacheable html, js, and css seemed ideal. No need to clean out spam comments, no database maintenence. Simple backup and restore. Hugo is just what I need right now.

Topics

I still plan on posting about PowerShell since that is what I use most at work, but my technical knowledge has expanded well beyond PowerShell. Since I mostly run Linux at home and have automated lots of tasks via Ansible. Most of my home services run inside of Docker.

I’m big into self-hosting now. FreshRSS is my go-to self-hosted app. As an online news junkie, I was a Google Reader fan. I was sad when they forced me off but now, I know to keep an exit strategy in mind when signing up for services. There will be more self-hosting posts soon.

Social Media

Social media has taken a big hit this past year. With Elon buying Twitter and Reddit pissing off their community, it is getting to where I need to quit them. I’ll be reevaluating my use of the social media, thus the relaunch. I’ve already removed the apps from my phone, forcing myself to use the more unpleasant mobile sites. This blog will likely replace my posting.