22 February 2022
As I've mentioned on LinkedIn, I've been sans FTE employment since just before the holidays last year, and I'm using the time to do some re-shuffling of some of my "digital footprint" on the Internet. Let me explain a bit about what's going on here, mostly so that if you're consuming an RSS feed for one, and you're not getting what you expect, you may want to flip over to the other. (Or both!)
For starters, I've come to realize that I want two, separate "representations" of myself on the Internet for public consumption, one professional, the other personal.
The professional persona will be here, on newardassociates.com, in which I talk pretty much about what everybody expects me to talk about (if you don't know me personally): programming languages, platforms, virtual machines, management, and so on. Think of www.newardassociates.com as the pair to my LinkedIn account. That means there will be two top-level domains:
The personal persona, tedneward.com, will be a bit more free-form, and wide-ranging. I may talk about technology, but I will also feel more free to host other non-professional things, such as D&D, fiction I feel like posting, maybe some photos, and who knows what else. That means there's going to be a couple of different domains there, as well:
The key? I'm doing all of this using static site generators, Markdown, GitHub, GitHub Actions, and hosting them in Azure. This way, I can either use the GitHub web-editor to create a new post online directly (and have it auto-posted to the site within minutes), or queue it up by writing locally and shipping when I push to main. Automating all of this has been a thorn in my side for quite a while, but I wanted a reason to learn GitHub Actions, and while I could've done some or all of this using a variety of other platforms, I've been meaning to spend a little time with Azure anyway, so here we go. (And no, I didn't consider running one on Azure, one on AWS, one on Digital Ocean... because life is too short and I'd rather find a different forcing function for each of those cloud providers.)
If you're still reading, thanks for staying with, and hopefully this will reduce the barrier-to-blog that's kept me from writing more in the last few years. (It's kinda not, but let's pretend that's what it was and let me slide, OK?)
Last modified 22 February 2022