Who Am I?
Hello World! I’m Aadam and at the time of writing I’m an Apprentice DevOps Engineer working at HMRC on the MDTP (Multi Channel Digital Tax Platform) for the Build and Deploy team.
I’ve been interested in technology for the best part of the last 6 years, ever since I built my first PC (Pentium G4400, RX 480, 8GB RAM). And thanks to the first COVID-19 lockdown I started learning full stack development - my first proper dive into programming outside of my GSCE and A-Level Computer science courses. During those months I learnt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before moving on to Node.js, React, and MongoDB, using Linux (Ubuntu via WSL) and Git along the way.
My first full stack project was
twitter-clone, an
‘attempt’ to clone Twitter using the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, and
Node.js) stack. If you have a look through the repository, my lack of
knowledge at the time really shows - I wrote all the code without tests
in two commits! I didn’t manage to finish it but I do intend to do a V2
with my new found knowledge.
Not long after writing twitter-clone, I found out that I had been
enrolled onto the apprenticeship, so my focus shifted to learning the
tools that I knew were being used on MDTP. I now spend most of my time
working with AWS, Python, Terraform, Jenkins, and Artifactory.
Why Am I Starting A Blog?
There are three main reasons:
- Recently, I completed my apprenticeship portfolio - the only regular writing that I was doing. As someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy writing, I wanted a reason to continue.
- Most software / devops engineers have benefited from blog posts, whether it was finding a solution to a very specific problem, learning a new concept, or even gaining understanding of different perspectives on various topics.
- A blog allows me to keep a record of the projects, learnings, experiences, and achievements I’ve made over time - it’s a window into past versions of myself that I can look back and reflect on.
Alongside the above points, the final push was reading Ben Kuhn’s ‘Why and how to write things on the Internet’. For anyone else considering starting a blog but unsure about how to start writing, I highly recommend reading it.
What Can You Expect?
I don’t really have a set of topics that I’m going to limit this blog to, however, I expect that the majority of posts will cover topics under the DevOps umbrella: cloud, programming, cybersecurity, etc.
What I do know is that my next few posts will be about: the architecture of this site, my hardware, my development environment, and my apprenticeship experience. You can also expect new posts every two weeks.
I also intend to add another section to the site, Snippets. Snippets will be short posts containing code snippets and commands that I find useful in my daily work.
Closing
Thank you for taking the time to read this post, hopefully, the first of many.
If you are interested in following my blog, an RSS feed can be found at /blog/rss.xml.
Feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like me to write about, or improvements that could be made to this site.