Meta on sgarland.dev

A Return From A Lengthy Hiatus

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 19:27:15 -0400

It’s been awhile

Specifically, it’s been 484 days since I last posted. Things have changed a bit. In short:

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages instead of an EC2
The site uses Hugo instead of WordPress
The site is fronted with bunny.net instead of Cloudflare
I’m now a Database Reliability Engineer
I was diagnosed with ADHD

What happened?

Yak-shaving, mostly. I’ll have ChatGPT turn it into a run-on sentence for fun:

I can has job!

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 04:59:33 +0000

Well, it happened. I’m not sure what weighting the various components held (I’ve gathered that the amount of things I dove into as personal projects was the dominant factor), but however it played out, it worked. I’m now (actually, for about a month now - I didn’t want to jinx it) an Associate Site Reliability Engineer for LogicMonitor. They’re a California company, but have an office (two, for now, soon to be merged) in Austin. Their product is an extremely impressive device monitoring solution, allowing companies to easily view the status of their servers, cloud instances, switches, and anything else with a heartbeat. I’m using it myself to monitor this website’s health, as well as the mongodb container on my home server, as I’m using it in a school project. It sends an email and Slack notification when it detects an outage. The product can also interface with PagerDuty or anything else with an API to send out escalations to the needed personnel.

First Post!

Sun, 19 May 2019 07:05:53 +0000

Before Reddit, there was Digg. Before Digg, there was /.

Anyway, moving on. This site aims to share some of the more interesting stuff that I do, and also, a way for me to play with AWS, because #marketability. I’ll have to figure out Azure and Google Cloud later.

When the .dev TLD launched, I thought, “self, you should get one of those, because all the cool kids have a website as a shrine to their hubris.” After an agonizing decision of whether to use first.last, firstLast, firstInitLast, or firstInit.last, I settled on the latter. My name is Stephan, and I like to pretend I’m a software developer. You can read more about my background in my About Me page, but suffice it to say, I’ve been playing with computers long enough to be able to write an autoexec.bat file without the help of the internet (don’t test me, please, it probably won’t work).

About Me

Sun, 19 May 2019 06:39:05 +0000

tl;dr tinkerer, can fix/operate anything electr{ical, onic}, know some languages, operated a nuclear reactor, UT Austin MS SWE. Contact info at bottom.

I like to tinker. I like to know how stuff works. I will yak shave the hell out of everything. I live in ~~Austin, TX (r/austin will insist I live in Greater Austin, but they’re also pedants),~~ Charlotte, NC (r/Charlotte will not care that I live in a suburb, because they aren’t as pedantic as Austinites) or close enough to it to not matter. I’m an ~~Associate~~ ~~Site Reliability Engineer~~ Database Reliability Engineer at ~~LogicMonitor~~ Zapier, which if you’ve been reading this blog since the start, means I was successful at pivoting my career. woot, or whatever kids these days say.