Hello World

So. Here we are. You're reading words I typed while avoiding actual responsibilities, and I'm writing words while avoiding actual responsibilities. This feels suspiciously like a dysfunctional digital symbiosis, but welcome aboard anyway. Learning a new language starts with a “Hello World” so I’ll call this post that.

Let me properly introduce myself since you've clearly stumbled into my digital living room. I'm Joel. By day, I perform arcane rituals to appease the Cloud Gods (mostly AWS and Azure, though occasionally I dabble in the dark arts of Google Cloud when feeling particularly masochistic). People call this "DevOps" or "SRE" or "Platform Engineering," but really it's just professional whack-a-mole where the moles are servers and the mallet is YAML. Sometimes I win. Sometimes the moles form a union. It's complicated. Whatever.

Why?

I've reached that dangerous age where men traditionally do dull things like buy dull cars or take up falconry. Instead, I started a blog. This is clearly the mature choice or another dull idea.
I almost didn't launch this blog. Not because of technical challenges or laziness, but because of that nagging tech bro question: "What's your unique value proposition?"

Then I realised I don't have one. I'm not here to "disrupt" or "innovate" or "synergize." I'm just a guy who loves technology, hates unnecessary complexity, enjoys flying, and occasionally has coherent thoughts between debugging sessions. My credentials? I've broken production environments in multiple countries and lived to tell the tales.

What to Expect (Besides Occasional Regret)

I admire people with niche blogs about "Python left pad optimization techniques." I am not those people.

1. Cloud/Infrastructure Shenanigans:
   I'll rant about AWS and cry about Microsoft, Kubernetes clusters, and why every "serverless" solution causes pain. I might even share my patented "Five Stages of Production Outage Grief" (Spoiler: Stage 4 involves questionable whiskey choices).

2. Aviation Adventures:

   As a private pilot, I've developed a Pavlovian response to the smell of 100LL.

   I'll take you inside the cockpit (metaphorically) to explore this world that breeds superiority complexes.

3. Tech Philosophy (With Poor Life Choices):
   Deep dives into critical questions like:

• Why do we call it "Artificial Intelligence" when it's mostly artificial stupidity?

• Can we rebrand tech debt as "technical nostalgia"?

• Why does every documentation page look like it was translated through Klingon and back?

  Will there be useful technical insights? Absolutely but covered in the metaphorical Cheeto dust of real world chaos. Will there be aviation stories? Definitely! An hour wont pass without me talking about aeroplanes.

  If you've read this far, congratulations and my condolences. You clearly have the same questionable judgment that led me to start this circus. Feel free to yell at me.
  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go troubleshoot another prod issue. Some things never change.

Clear skies and clean builds,
Joel