Hello World!

Who Am I?

Hello! My name is Aadam, 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 involved with 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 web development - my first foray into programming outside of my GSCE and A-Level Computer Science courses. Over the following 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 self-directed full stack project was twitter-clone , which unsurpisingly was my attempt to clone Twitter using the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js) stack, if you have look at 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 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, and 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 keep writing regularly.
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 on and reflect on how I’ve improved.

Alongside the above points the straw that broke the camel’s back 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, and concepts under the DevOps umbrella: cloud, programming, cybersecurity, etc.

What I can guarantee 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 very 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, there is an RSS feed available. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like me to write about, or improvements that could be made to this site.

#blogpost #introduction