Hello, all. I am dialing in from the frontier. We’ve crossed over into a new decade. 2020 is here and with it new luck and good tidings!

I’ve been neglecting this blog. As much as I could say that I’m thinking about picking it back up and being consistent, I’d rather spend less time typing that out and more time typing anything that will help me better convey some thoughts and develop myself personally. It’s hard to put into perfect terms the reason why I’ve been so bad at following up with this although maybe I can try to capture some of that in the coming weeks. Since the last update (not including the spontaneous photo of meme-ified Sammy the Shark), I’ve gotten married among other things. The wedding was lovely, spending time with family and friends, while also taking a moment for a victory lap around with my now-wife. There’s something so surprising about bringing all the disparate parts of our lives together into one venue. Uniting folks that we know from different music scenes to those that I’ve worked with in an IT role. You never realize how much you make these different presentations of yourself, curated for specific people. This is something that I think I should work on, focusing on being the one, true version of me.

Professionally, I’ve kicked it up a notch at DigitalOcean. As of now, I’m a “Senior Developer Support Engineer”. IT titles are always somewhere between words loosely related to the role. In short, I am a technical leader for the networking vertical within Support. I cover the exceptionally complex as well as training and resource creation. It’s also important to point out that Support doesn’t sound exciting to the outsider although you’d certainly be wrong. We get the ability to help share guidance on issues that developers and system administrators are running into which can be unique in each ticket.

I’m making sure to keep my foot on the gas of graduate studies, having just completed the first year of that program. We’re closing in on the planning period for my own research, something that unsettles me to think about although is something that I must surely tackle. At least I’ve had the last few weeks to step away from classes although this week is the return so I’ll try to share a bit more about what I’m working on there as we continue our death march forward.

Since we’re currently in a bit of the afterglow of the new year, I wanted to try throwing some targets out for this year. Let’s say it’s a way of trying to keep me a bit honest. I’m hoping to keep some personal projects in hand that work on a few different things. One of the biggest goals is just pushing my understanding of Docker a bit more. It’s not to say that I’m awful or don’t understand how to use it although I want to be able to shift a lot of my personal projects to Docker containers so they can be easily crushed and re-deployed in a moment flat.

The second big thing is better SQL-fu. There’s a real need to understand SQL queries of any kind considering the general target that I’m moving toward. Threat intelligence is especially going to be contingent upon the application in SQL. Lastly, I simply want to keep working on some personal Python projects. This is a constant thing for me, wanting to move my programming chops forward. There’s a good reason for that. We all really oughta get better at programming rather than being decent at just writing up some scripts.

I’ll leave this blog post here for now and potentially share another one in short order with a bit of a reading list for the interested. Til then, fellow travelers of the new frontier.