Welcome

Hello? Is this thing on? Good. Welcome to my tech blog. Here you will find all sorts of stuff that I’ve found interesting while working as a consultant and developer for cloud infrastructure and automation, with an eye for security & compliance concerns at scale.

I also blog about stuff that I find interesting, strictly within the tech space. So that includes side-projects and whatnot.

Disclaimer: All content here are my opinions alone, and do not formally represent those of my employers - past, present, or future.

Who Am I?

Follow the links to find out more:

How did I set this blog up?

Let’s start with some desired outcomes:

  • Keep it simple - strip back the end-end worklow to minimise moving parts.
  • It’s gotta be “almost-free” to host…
  • AND there won’t be any spikes in cost (beware free tiers in Cloud providers!)
  • Its easy to author
  • I can setup a minimalistic css theme without much effort
  • It has tagging support
  • I don’t care about authoring from mobile - desktop|laptop will be fine.

My solution:

  • The maclure.info domain I had already registered via Amazon’s Route 53 service. So I’ll use R53 to manage DNS.
  • The code for most of my projects are hosted on github, which has support for “pages”, which is (free) static hosting, AND custom domain names are supported. Perfect.
  • Hugo is a static site generator I’ve used in the past, seems decent and fast, with some nice themes. That means I can locally compile, removing the need for an external build server.

The end result is that I can do the following:

  • I can run a local server and preview my drafts
  • I can commit and push drafts up to github without changing the deployed site content
  • I can configure Hugo to build the static site into /docs subfolder, which is compatible with github’s hosting
  • I can “publish” content by setting “draft: false” in the metadata, running the “hugo” binary, then git commit & git push
  • I maintain zero-infrastructure! Well, I manage a domain, that’s it.

What’s next?

Over time I will write and publish blog posts focused around whatever I’m learning or playing with at the time.

This will mostly be for my learning benefit, as I find being able to write about a topic in a manner that explains it to someone else really helps me to internalise my own understanding of the content.

So yeah, this blog is mainly for me, but written for public consumption also.

Welcome.