What do I write about?

As most of these things go, I saw some Youtube videos, thought about my life, and pondered whether starting a newsletter was something that might be worthwhile to me, and more importantly, to other people. Three DMs and three affirmative responses later, here we are!

If this turns out to be a total dud, blame them. Names won’t be provided but since you’re reading this, you must be incredibly resourceful, handsome, and gifted with an over-abundance of intellect so I’m sure you have your ways!

This will be a place for me to collect thoughts about the meta-connectedness of various ideas. From devops practices to fitness to philosophy to life. I frequently find myself stealing concepts from one area to another and wanted to share those thoughts with people who may care.

That’s not to say there won’t be hard, crunchy bits. I do love the technical tutorials and there’ll be no shortage of those, rest assured. I have tons of ideas about what I want to talk about but I want to connect these tutorials in ways to make your life easier to manage and smooth any direction you want in your personal development, professional or otherwise.

There’s a lot of ground to cover and I’ve struggled in the past with ideas of wanting to write structured courses. Large over-arching things that would walk people through from A-Z but those types of writings are usually a bit dry, and my mind wanders.

So do me a favor, talk to me. Tell me what intrigues you, frustrates you, baffles you and we’ll line up all the Venn diagrams and start hop-scotching through the intersections at random!

How often will you get these things?

I am going to try to write something 3x a week minimum. How successful that will be depends heavily on whatever unknown realities come with writing that frequently since I haven’t done it before!

What the heck is Devops?

If you’re asking that question, it’s most likely because you’ve looked up a bunch of definitions from articles, blog posts, videos and it was all too high-in-the-sky (like it was for me). So I’ll give you my definition of devops:

I realize that’s not any less high-in-the-sky but the implications of that definition cover all of it. When some developer writes some software application that runs fine on her computer, a devops engineer can talk to her and offer advice, provide solutions, and implement practices that will take that software from text-on-screen to usable on another person’s device (in a web browser, on mobile, on a desktop).

That means in the case of a sysadmin, devops may be as simple as copying a python script to a coworker who needs to do the same task the script handles. Smoothing that process out is the heart of good devops work. Not a specific tool, not industry practices, not the new hotness. It can be all of those things but if you can’t answer “Did I make this easier to go from the beginning to someone using it?” with “Yes!”, you should consider if that’s the best solution you want to offer.

Of course, that’s the most rudimentary scenario and there are so many other areas to cover in the actuality of “smoothing the way” so we’re now full circle to “What do I write about?”. Lots more to come!