Why I’m Starting This Blog
I’m Carl — a DevOps engineer with 8+ years in IT, currently working on infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and databases by day. This site has had a CV sitting on it for a while now, and honestly, a CV only tells you what I’ve done. It doesn’t tell you how I think, what I’m curious about, or what I’m building when nobody’s asking me to.
That’s what this blog is for.
What I’ll actually write about
Nothing hypothetical — just what’s in front of me:
- Things I’m building. I’ve got a side project called LogExtractor, a log ingestion pipeline I built in .NET 10 that tails logs into PostgreSQL, with a Blazor dashboard on top and the whole thing packaged in Docker. I’ll write about the decisions behind it, what broke, what I’d do differently.
- Things I’m learning. I’m currently working toward Microsoft’s AI-200 (Azure AI Cloud Developer Associate) certification. Documenting that as I go seemed more useful than just cramming silently.
- Things I’m tinkering with. Outside of the day job I’ve been messing around with AI tools and IoT — running Home Assistant, flashing ESP32 devices, generally seeing what I can get talking to what. Expect some posts that are more “I got this working at 11pm” than polished tutorial.
Why bother
Partly for accountability — writing something down in public has a way of keeping you honest about whether you actually finished it. Partly because I’ve learned a lot from other people’s build logs and postmortems over the years, and it feels right to add something back. And partly, selfishly, because explaining something well is usually the fastest way to find out if you actually understand it.
No fixed schedule, no content calendar — just posts when there’s something worth saying. First real one coming soon: a walkthrough of LogExtractor, start to finish.