What’s Up, World?

Because Hello, World! is sooo 1976.

This is a technical blog.
Let’s get some technical details out of the way.

• The content is written in markdown
• The site is built with Jekyll.
• It’s hosted on Github Pages.
• You can view even view the source code.

Why am I writing this?

One of my resolutions for 2018 is to improve my writing.¹² It turns out that in order to write better, you have to write more. I’ve been Bullet Journaling for a while now - but that doesn’t really let me flex my creative writing muscles. I have already started writing a regular journal, but I’ve been wanting to start a technical blog for a while. There are a number of tech/programming/ops blogs I read religiously. Julia Evans, Rachel by the Bay, Joel on Software, Dan Luu, etc. You know the drill. Incredibly smart people writing incredibly well about incredibly cool^{and some incredibly mundane} things.³ I don’t imagine my technical rants will ever be seen in the same light as some of those talented individuals, but maybe someone desperately scouring the internet for a weird Docker error will stumble upon a post here and fix their problem become even more confused.

About Me

I’m currently doing fun dev/ops stuff with the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Radiology. I help the dev team build and deploy their applications using tools like Docker and Jenkins. We write mostly web-based applications and manage everything from the Radiology Website to clinical applications that are used every day in the UW Hospital. We’re teamed up with the awesome folks at UW Health to provide remarkable healthcare and do amazing research.

Before this I worked as a Linux system administrator at the UW Center for High Throughput Computing and at the Morgridge Institure for Research.

Outside of work, I like building silly applications and websites that rarely ever get finished. I also enjoy dabbling in pixel art and drawing/animating with CSS/HTML and SVG.

What to Expect

Honestly, I’m not sure yet. I’m going to try like really, really hard to post content regularly. I expect I will write about what I’m working on both professionally and personally. I’ll write about the interesting problems we encounter and (hopefully) the solutions to those problems. I might write a hands-on guide to implementing a technology or some long-form essays. I might even write some fiction or share a joke.

It’s time to sign off, though. This post is dated 2018-03-24 and I see the clock has just ticked past midnight. My first post and I’m already breaking the rules.

1. I just realized the Calendar emoji doesn’t show the current date and for some reason that really bothers me. ↩

2. I also just realized you can create footnotes in Markdown. Awesome. ↩

3. Maybe I can expand my vocabulary a bit, too? ↩