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Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash I’m a religious note-taker. Back in my school days, I kept lots of notebooks and I had a habit of always carrying around a Moleskine and jotting down ideas, writing notes, or journaling. Now many years later I’ve developed a habit of writing my notes in digital form. Mostly this was so that I could make them searchable. At first, my notes started out as a few text files but eventually, I started writing all of my notes in Markdown....

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash I recently had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn asking if I would mentor them on Ansible. Like many sysadmins I know I’m short on bandwidth and regretfully had to decline. But I did offer a book recommendation and a link to the Ansible Discord I sometimes frequent… But this was enough to inspire me to write up some of my thoughts on learning Ansible....

Updated 2023-09-16 This is a collection of recommended DevOps learning resources. Those with a ✅ green check-mark are my favorite resources for those topics. DevOps Online resources DevOps Roadmap SRE Books – Google Getting into DevOps – Reddit Books ✅ The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Digital Disruption, Developers, and Overthrowing the Ancient Powerful Order by Gene Kim The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, et al....

In November of 2019, I started working as a Tier 1 support agent at a web-hosting company in the Denver, CO area. Just shy of 18 months later I was promoted to Managed Hosting Analyst, which is a Linux Sysadmin role. I retained a couple roles between then. I was promoted to Tier 1 Expert at about 3 months in, and around 9 months later I received a promotion to Advanced Product Support, which is basically a Jr....

I recently learned that the greatest predictor of success in an endeavor is not anything you would typically think. It’s not IQ, socioeconomic status… whether you grew up rich or poor, or whether you had good parents. Actually, it’s a difficult to define quality called grit. To give an example, with enough grit you can overcome all odds and become a navy seal. Just take a look at David Goggins. I’m paraphrasing, but he came from a racist part of Alabama....