Starting a new blog

Introduction

Welcome to my blog! Firstly, if you’re reading this then thanks for taking the time out of your day. Secondly, hello! I’m Richard Nye, a SysAdmin with 9 years’ experience in the industry having worked my way up through the ranks. I began in 2016 automating business processes with SharePoint 2010 using a combination of InfoPath and SharePoint workflows, which is making me feel ancient! Since then I’ve had a varied career across a lot of sectors, for a variety of organisations, and I’ve delivered a vast amount of projects.

Fast forward to today, my skillset is very much a jack-of-all-trades. I’d say my primary strengths are in the Microsoft world; 365 (including Intune, Defender XDR, Exchange), PowerShell, Windows Server, and Windows more generally. But I’ve also got experience with other areas; monitoring (Zabbix and Grafana), Cybersecurity and compliance (ISO27001), implementing a variety of systems (Zendesk, HubSpot, EPOS, the list goes on!), and working with databases.

I’ve even dabbled in a bit of software development with ASP.NET Core!

Why a blog?

I’m at a stage in my career, like many of us are I imagine, where it’s time to learn new skills or get left behind. The days of purely GUI-driven sysadmin work are fading fast. Automation is king, but so is devops and learning from our software dev brothers-in-arms! I’ve already used Terraform in the past, but I wanted to branch out into the world of Ansible, GitHub Actions, Proxmox, Linux, the list is endless. And given how vast that list is, I really wanted to be able to share and track my progress.

So a blog helps me two-fold: I love writing, hopefully that’s coming across, and I also wanted to reflect on the reasoning behind my choices for my homelab and other projects. The questions I want my blog posts to answer:

• What have I learned about a technology?
• Why have I chosen a specific architecture?
• What has hindsight taught me if I were to implement this tech again?

Why Chirpy, Jekyll, and GitHub Pages?

Firstly, it’s extremely low cost (free!). Secondly, I’m not looking to become a front-end dev - I want my time primarily to go into devops tech and backend programming. Thirdly, there’s an excellent video from TechnoTim that outlined the entire process and I’ve gone from absolutely nothing to writing and publishing this blog post in one evening! My deployment process wasn’t as simple as following that video, and I’ll create a follow-up post that outlines my exact steps from a fresh Windows machine to this blog post.

For now, though, welcome to the blog!