Cue the Whitesnake!

Well, here I am, and here I go (again)....

I've had a long career in technology up to this point, and sometimes you wonder what direction to go in, even though you want to stay in the same field, maybe even the same industry.

I currently am a Senior Solutions Architect with IBM, and was part of an acquisition. I've worked in many industries and positions before then, from Help Desk Technician to Software Engineer to Senior SRE. Within IBM, you can specialize in any one of a number of specialties. But which one?

My first exposure to computers was on a TI-99/4A back in the mid-80's. Since then, the interest hasn't waned although the focus might have, given market forces and current interests.

My first exposure to DevOps was in 2014 when I was hired as a DevOps Software Engineer. From then on, future positions were mostly on the DevOps/SRE front, leveraging cloud providers from Linode to hyperscalers like Azure.

From Ansible to AI, from Grafana to GitOps, from on-prem to cloud, from Nomad (!) to Kube, I've seen & done quite a bit.

But at some junctures in a career it is good to take stock, re-orient, re-commit and go forth with a new sense of purpose. That is where I find myself right now - not necessarily at a fork in the road, but perhaps at a gas station to "grab a map" (and some snacks).

You'll notice this blog is hosted on Blogger, which is a platform that some may consider past its prime. However, it cuts down on what I have to host & manage myself so that I can focus solely on content, centered around what I'm learning/doing in my off-hours.

And what exactly am I learning/doing right now? Well, golang (and growing my vegetable seedlings). Lately I've been making a game in C using the orx game engine. The engine is quite powerful, but the batteries-included nature of the engine causes me some consternation with some unruly (albeit funny) side effects. I have been thinking about redoing the game essentially from the ground up using golang and oak as I would like to try approaching the project with a fresh pair of eyes, and to contribute at least somewhat regularly to a fun open source project like oak as well.

My open source contributions have been few and far between over the years, with life, family and moves (the majority of contributions are to my own projects). That is changing slowly, and with a third child about to graduate high school, yes, the times - they will be a-changing.

In this day and age, it seems that AI is here to stay, and I may blog about my dalliances with models and AI's intersections with my life and work, in addition to technologies I'm taking for a spin in my home lab, or what I happen to be coding up.

And having finished The Iliad late last year, I'm also now reading The Odyssey (incidentally also in preparation for Christopher Nolan's film version coming out this year). In between my golang book & Homer, I'm trying to squeeze in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. I have a pretty cool home office/study (thanks to my wife). I'll show you some pictures sometime.

But for now, be well, do good work, and keep in touch.