Why I’m blogging here

How did we end up here?

Hi! I’m Michael O’Leary, and this is my first blog post on this site. I’m a Senior Solutions Architect at F5, and I love my job. My goal here is to have an easy place to quickly document solutions for myself, colleagues, and perhaps informally for customers.

Over the years I’ve done some blogging and writing of tech articles. I previously hosted a tech blog myself using a Wordpress server that I hosted in AWS or Azure, but the overhead of system administration (server updates, Wordpress updates, learning and knowing all about plugins) was just too much for me. I shut it down, along with some other side projects.

For the last five years I’ve written a lot of articles on F5’s community website, DevCentral. This has been a great experience. Some of my articles have helped many colleauges and customers, and a few of them have been very popular. I’ll probably end up linking to my most popular articles at some point during my blogging here.

However, writing tech articles on a corporate website comes with some time-consuming restraints:

• compliance with corporate/marketing policies, like full spelling out of product names, approved abbreviations, etc.
• SEO/site optimization within corporate guidelines
• internal article submission and approval processes
• limitations of that Content Management System and the configurations managed by administrators, etc.

To this day, I still have a single Wordpress server in AWS using AWS Lightsail that costs me around $5 USD per month. I hate it, even though it’s almost zero work for me. I don’t remember how I set it up, I can never remember any passwords I’ve used, but it hosts a few websites for a friend’s business, so I need to keep it running. I’m dreading the day I need to touch it because I have purged all memory of how to administer Wordpress from my brain.

Cheers to the future!

So, this blog should allow me a very informal format for quickly documenting things. Thank you to Thomas Stringer who recently gave an overview of how he hosts his developer blog. I’ve just copied him for now, although I may try a few tweaks later to make this blog a little more unique.

I’m really looking forward to a few things

• informal, short posts!
• easy, short code snippets
• free blog hosting
• git-based deployment of this blog

Enjoy!