Who?
My name is Alex, these days I would call myself a site reliability engineer (SRE) but I’ve held the title of network engineer, systems engineer and software engineer. I enjoy tech a great deal and could never have the life I lead without it, this goes doubly for open source software (OSS) which has enabled my entire career including big hitters like Linux, Django, Zabbix, Prometheus, and Hugo.
Why?
The internet is becoming tiring at present and you’ve probably heard my reasoning one hundred times before. There are so many SEO optimised websites which rank in all the top search results the actual quality of content is definitely getting worse over time. This is to say nothing of the AI generated sites which are by definition adding nothing new to the conversation due to having no imagination beyond nonsense hallucinations.
The worst of the internet today has to be recipe websites, filled with enough auto-playing videos, adverts and three thousand words of pre-story before you can even find the ingredients or steps to make. If you want a website entirely devoid of this, check out www.annexrecipes.com where my partner and I keep many of our favourite meals in an easily consumed format.
If we want the internet to repopulate with valuable websites providing personal valuable insights for people - not search engines, then we need to be the ones to create it.
From a learning perspective running a website is one of the most tech things a person can do. Whether it is learning a CI/CD pipeline, figuring out the best way to deploy a webserver, managing DNS records, or any other reasons that interests you.
How?
Static site generators are incredible in this day and age, I am using Hugo to create this site and it is hosted at zero cost to myself on Github using Github pages with a custom domain. This provides a nearly free, brilliant user experience with nothing beyond Microsoft’s hosting to go wrong and they have people for that. As such this website costs me… Well I don’t know anymore because domains.google.com got bought out by Squarespace and I’ve been too lazy to migrate away yet, though it looks like namecheap will be charging me about £12.00 a year.
What?
So what will this site be about? This is going to be a super traditional blog, meaning anything and everything from my various interests of finance, tech, entrepreneurship, to any random topic that takes my fancy. The goal is to provide a more human touch to the internet in this tiny little space.