Forced Resurrection

I was recently quite strongly reminded of the need to have a fully operational website or blog, and actually had to give some thought to where my last version resided and what it was called (it didn’t matter too much actually, as non of the previous incarnations were operational). However, in the process of migrating some of the old articles across (very useful to me for historic reasons), I realised it has been over 10 years since I last properly submitted something to the blog - but even more than that, what has changed in my life, technology, and the systems and services I now use in comparison to 10 years ago.

10 years ago I had just changed jobs into a role that was technically less hands-on and became more management focused - although I still managed to keep my hand-in and even gained new skills in Infrastructure as code through Terraform and Azure - now I’ve departed from mainstream I.T. and am self-employed, with multiple streams of work. This gives me so much more control over my time and focus, and I’m loving it.

10 years ago I was complaining about my 23" monitor woes - nowadays that’s turned into a rock-solid 32" monitor.

10 years ago I was getting more involved in Linux Desktops - today my daily driver is a Lenovo Laptop running NixOS with Plasma desktop and I love it! I do still run both Windows and Mac machines (and even dual boot on this Lenovo), but at least 90% of my time is in Linux now. I’ve also found really good alternatives to most of the Windows apps I was chained to for many years - LibreOffice has been around for years and is great, but I really like OnlyOffice. I’m mostly using Joplin for notes/note-taking (although I still need to revert to OneNote for adaptive note sizing on my iPad)

Some major things have changed - I no longer work in the 9-5 grind in I.T. as I used to - and I have to say the change is very refreshing. I run multiple businesses that keep things ticking over nicely. That’s not to say I’m not involved in I.T. daily, just differently.

There are many other things that have changed or that I use differently, but perhaps I’ll discuss them in other articles… but for now, the site has been resurrected!