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Hello World, and Welcome to My New Site!

As of August 9th, 2023, I've decided to come back to my portfolio site and give it some juice. Namely, I wanted to rewrite it and start from the ground up, for the most part.

The Why

As I get further along in my career, and life in general, I figured I do a lot of projects both inside and outside of work. Namely, I have my own home lab with a good number of servers. They run Proxmox VMs and those VMs are tied together as a k8s cluster. There is a ton of work behind all this and I used the k8s cluster to host all sorts of things.

  • Internal applications
    • Status site so I can monitor app health, keep track of SSL certs, and improve performance
    • Internal documentation site (also made with Material for MkDocs as well!)
    • List/directory app for a quick list of all my internal apps and links to them
  • External / Mix-use applications
    • Recipe book using Mealie
    • Self-hosted GitLab with on-site runners
  • Infrastructure
    • Traefik for internal and external facing apps
    • DNS using Technitium
    • PostgreSQL with replication
    • Redis, MongoDB, Gotify and more
    • Several NASs for storage for k8s cluster and backup of computers on the network
    • UniFi networking equipment
  • And much, much more going on

Outside of all the stuff I've learned running my homelab, there's so much more I like to do. I can talk about really anything but also other endevours such as making games in Unity - which is a constant on-again, off-again thing for me I'd like to really commit to; my cloud journey and working towards AWS certifications; gardening, cooking, and photography; and so on.

Why Material for MkDocs

I use this extensively for my own internal documentation site. If I ever need to remember how to provision an SSL cert using acme.sh, I can just pop it open, search, and then there's my guide I wrote about how to do it for my needs. It really is also easy to use and the plugins, extensions, and great feature set overall is just an easy choice for me. It also helps that I use it at work too for runbooks for my team's technical guides, applications, and knowledge sharing.

Going from Here

This is feature parity with the old site (which was a stalled, abandoned mess of plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). Even worse so, it was using jQuery - yikes - so glad to be rid of that dumpster fire.

There's so much more I'd like to add. There's this new blog section you're seeing now and I'm starting on my portfolio section. I feel like this will only mature and get better, as long I stick with it. I want to dig around for inspiration as well and see what sort of templates I want to follow to make posting and updating the site as easy as possible.

We'll see what can be for sure. For now, it is late and it is time for sleep. Until next time.

  1. 2023-08-21: Updating new line issues, cleaning up formatting. ↩