As of Feb 2021, approximately 7 million blog posts are created every day. 1 more blog shouldn’t hurt. There are quite a few thoughts floating around in my head, and a blog seems like a good way to organize ideas and share insights. Think of it like a filing cabinet for my brainspace. Likely, all the topics I mention will fall into two buckets:

  1. Technology - cloud tech, security, coding, distributed computing, microservices, industry trends (hop on board the hype train)
  2. Business - productivity, consulting, current events, industry trends

Having lived most of my career at the intersection of business and technology, I have seen how the two have more closely coincided in a way that ultimately makes my list above non-MECE. I’d like to peel back the layers of buzzwords like BlockchainAIMachineLearningCryptoIoT, “digital transformation”, etc. and observe them with a skeptical eye from both lenses - the geeky in-depth understanding of what these things are and how they work, as well as the meaning of these concepts from a business sense.

Selfishly, this blog is also a side project that will allow me to experiment with a variety of technologies. I’ll keep readers up to date with what’s going on there, but again, that’s probably mostly for my own benefit.

Behind the scenes, this site is a static web page hosted on AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). The content I write is written to a GitHub repository, compiled and served up using Jekyll and deployed using a Continuous Integration/Delivery process run with CircleCI. All of these services at this point are free (including the static website hosting) and I don’t have to maintain any infrastructure.

If I had a mission statement for this blog it would be this: maintain the blog as cheaply as possible with as little effort as possible so that I can focus on content.

There are still some basic things that need work. I’m new to Jekyll so right now I have to search how to do every little thing, which is kind of painful, but pretty much par for the course when learning new tools.

For example, I don’t have a sidebar for archives and recent posts which would be very nice. I also don’t have any pictures and I’m using the barebones template I took from Jekyll (called minima). Additionally, I’d like to incorporate Disquss comments and Google Analytics into this site, but I’m not exactly sure where to start.

I started documenting my trials and tribulations for getting this site set up, but since it’s so specific to my machine and circumstances, I figure it’s kind of pointless to post this in favor of headier, more fun topics. Onwards.