About Me

If you want to learn more about me, this page is a good place to start.

My name is Tony, and I live in the West of Scotland. I won't tell you exactly where, as you might steal my washing. :-)

I started out my career in IT over fifteen years ago as a Windows Server Engineer. I've worked for and with companies as diverse as banks, the NHS,law firms, IT managed service providers and the UK Government.

Over the years, I've been really interested in the automation side of things, and since I've primarily been a Windows guy, that has meant Powershell.

However, I'd like to branch out into the world of DevOps, and whilst I have a decent basic grounding in Linux, cloud providers, CI/CD platforms and IaC tooling, I don't have anywhere to show it. So my plan is to build things and write code, and use those tools to deploy and host it. Then write about it here.

That is why I have this site in HTML, rather than Wordpress or some other CMS. It means I can create something, and try and get it working in real life. There isn't much point in taking certifications and watching endless videos if you don't actually do the work.

I also picked this template as it is simple, speedy and contains no tracking of you, Private Citizen!

So I have the following topics in mind to learn (and write about here):

• Locally hosting the site (IIS, LAMP/LEMP)
• Using containers (Docker, orchestrating using Kubernetes)
• Deploying to the cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) using IIS/LAMP/LEMP
• Deploying to the same cloud providers serverless tech
• Deploying using IaC tooling (Packer, Ansible, Terraform, Vault, Powershell DSC)
• Version control of my code using Git and Github
• Testing and deploying code via a CI/CD pipeline (Jenkins, Azure DevOps)
• Learning a new language (probably Python rather than German)
• Pulling items from a backlog, and setting sprints (probably Trello to begin with)

I also have around twenty related books to get through. As I read them, I'll try my best to review them here too.

Thanks for reading!