Tags: personal
Welcome to my first blog post (and hopefully not my last!). My original goal for this blog was to document my side projects, study notes and anything I felt could be valuable to others who are slogging away at their own projects. For now this post will be a brief introduction to me and try to outline what I hope to achieve with this blog.
Hello my names Nick and I'm an addict
...don't worry, I just have a screen problem, but then again who doesn't these days? I've spent my professional life working as a Network engineer/architect at the same company for the past 10 years or so. While doing so I was also studying at the Open University for a BSc (Hons) in Computing and IT, which I've recently completed with a First!! 🥳
My time studying at the OU was equally exhausting as it was satisfying and it was during my studies that I developed an interest in programming, funnily enough it was a Java module I completed in 2018 which was one of the hardest and frustrating modules I had completed. So big up to anyone else who slogged through M250 : Object Oriented Programming! It had a 4 hour hand written exam 🤦♂️ which you had to answer coding questions, no linters, no google, just you and an old skool notepad - I still have nightmares about it!
Now that the OU journey is behind me I've managed to bag a job as Network DevOps engineer for a large software company working in their cloud team. I'm pumped to get started and it is a huge shift away from the traditional networking role I've been working in.
What about my non-work life?
I'm a proud Dad to a nearly 3 year old girl and a 7 month boy and a husband to a wonderful and beautiful wife ( in case she reads this). I love playing video games and watching football when I'm not working or playing with side projects - such as creating this blog engine, written in Python using the Flask micro web framework, but that's a topic for another post!
What next?
I remember working on an issue at work and I was discussing it with an ex-colleague and he said "Nick, make sure you document it online once you've figured it out". This is exactly what I wanted to do, I've spent the best part of 6 months building this blog site (around my work and OU commitments) with the sole purpose of creating an online repository for every issue I've overcome or anything cool I've figured out. I expect to focus on:
- CI/CD workflows
- Multi-Cloud automation (Azure, AWS, GCP)
- Python Web Development
- Network automation
- Infrastructure as a Code (IaC)
Ciao for now!
I won't promise to write a blog post every day or every week but I hope to be relatively active especially once I've got up to speed in my new job. But until then I'm going to enjoy some time with my family over Christmas, ready to kill it next year!