remedium

Hello! This is the blog that I’ll be using to track my personal projects and learning in various tech spaces–at least, the things that can’t be stored in a git repo.

One of the issues I’ve run into over the years is that, while I’ve advanced beyond the very basics of end-userdom, I’m also not someone who grew up building computers and learning to program. Nor was I a math nerd (I was held back a grade in math and actually was a liberal arts major in college). I’ve found myself in a kind of liminal skill space that, frankly, would’ve discouraged me if I was less stubborn. I’m constantly running into gaps in my skills that have me wondering why I wasn’t learning Unix when I was twelve (Answer: It’s because I had different interests then, and IT was a passion I stumbled on by accident as an adult.)

It’s a familiar story, and there’s a lot of reasons for it: The ever-shifting cloud of available information online, the constant evolution of technologies resolving old problems and causing new ones, the fact that the field is heinously complex and so it’s often easier to shorthand and omit steps when documenting a specific type of problem. Especially as professionals, we forget just how much knowledge underlies our most conscious thought process, and it can be jarring and even frustrating to try to articulate what has become essentially the air we breathe as we work to put out server fires.

And, of course, there’s the persistent culture even among educators of throwing newbies rather abruptly in the deep end–not without reason, especially if you’re aiming for a professional role, but nonetheless in a way that can be extremely discouraging.

For my part, this blog helps me record and process what I’ve learned. Ideally, in fleshing out my posts I can identify things that I overlooked, and hold myself accountable for seeing an investigation and troubleshooting process through to the end. With luck, my processing can help other people looking for information about similar problems. And, maybe, I can convey some of the ineffable “how” of this process as well, to people like me who are neither geniuses of creative thinking nor dyed-in-the-wool engineers.

In the end, this is a process. Welcome.