Welcome

Nau mai - Welcome

You know that feeling where you discover something new and realising its potential, tryout new things with it? That intense interest and drive to see what it can do, what you can with it. And then your imagination runs away. That moment when you contemplate the potential it has and the ideas of it’s application, and you just want to explore and test and try it out.

That’s me when I’m trying out something that I’ve found in the depths of Github or the like. Excited to load it up and happy to get it working. And even keener to show it off to someone else that know will appreciate the layers of implications. These are the times and situations that I love about this industry of information, communication and technology. Sure, there are things to not like, but if I can help it, I will choose to concentrate on the things that I can change.

All of this curiosity and experimenting helps fuel my learning.

John Seely Brown once said, “It really is the case that if you become skilled at tinkering, you begin to get a gut feeling for how systems work…”

And I find that this free exploration with trial and error is pretty much how I work also.

Home

Hello World

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I wrote shit

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About Me

Jane Doe

A bit about me

Hi, my name is Dale, and I am systems engineer with a chronic tinkerer habbit.

In a previous life I was a OS X sysadmin, using Apple XSAN and rack mounted Mac Mini’s (and some super of Xserves) to run web services and fileshares, and managed end user service provisioning using JAMF for the School of Education at Waikato. Right now I am a Linux Sysadmin in the Systems Team for Information Technology Services at the University of Waikato, where I am responsible for building application servers on RedHat Enterprise Linux 7/8.

I believe in following upstream, staying close to stock, and patching and security by default. I love automation and use Ansible playbooks where possible for consistent and repeatable builds, allowing more time to innovate and iterate. I enjoy solving architecture problems with efficient and simple solutions, while maintaining system health,visibility through monitoring and future proofing through infrastructure as code an Continual Improvement.

Although I feel as though I’ve joined the Devops party late, seeing the advantages of containerising some of my systems in my homelab has brought me around to utilising it in my solutions professionally. Microservices appeals to me for the same reason that DevOps, version control and automation appeals to me, consistent and repeatable builds.

I love OSS projects hosted on GitHub, 12yo+ whiskies, and listening to audiobooks. I dabable in networking, home automation, security and Site Reliabliity Engineering.