Introduction
I hate food blogs.
Someday, I may open a food truck and, if it succeeds, I will owe some measure of my success to food blogs. At some point along your culinary journey, you don’t know how to make an omelet and, at some point even earlier, you don’t know how to boil potatoes.
Food blogs have their uses. Honestly, it’s not even the life stories that bother me, especially since the advent of the “Skip to Recipe” button (actual chef’s kiss). My problem with food blogs is that I experienced the internet when YouTube didn’t have ads. I remember a time some five or ten years ago when I could still use my smartphone to make dinner, when I could actually view the recipe without having to continually close ad after ad, only delaying the inevitable: the eventual crash and reload of the page. Now I don’t even bother; I use the print recipe feature, which, by the way, more and more requires one to sign up with an email address to use it. Alas, it was a simpler time when Yahooligans.com met all my internet needs. #itwasthe90s
Why does all of that even matter at all? I’m glad you asked. It’s the uselessness of the modern food blog that has driven me to build this collection of musings, technical and otherwise, on a platform free from the visual vomit of advertisements. That’s not to say that I won’t try to sell you on some things, ideas, platforms, and what have you. I won’t even promise to not be obnoxious about it, either. What I will ensure is that, in my selling, I will assault you with far less screen clutter and I will never harass you by hiding half a dozen close buttons all over the page. If you’re interested, this is all achieved via Cloudflare and GitHub from a Mac for the cost of the time, the electricity, and the roughly $11 annually for the domain name. In my specific case, it’s all done via voice dictation and eye tracking; (sidenote: The "hands-free" part definitely costs more than $11, but it's way easier on the hands and pretty darn cool.)
When I’m not cooking, I do all manner of computer stuffs. Career-wise I took the helpdesk to sysadmin path for a while and then found my way into cloudy things. These days, I spend the majority of my time bending Atlassian products to my will and the remainder of it filling in the cracks, usually with a (sidenote: I don't know that I ever again want to work in an Atlassian shop that doesn't also use Power Automate.)
I am passionate about education, data, automation, good process (not the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” kind, but rather the data-driven, smarter, faster, better customer experience kind), and providing real help authentically, even if it’s less than agreeable.
So that covers a little bit about who I am and where you are, but what are we going to talk about? Full transparency? Whatever I want to, but we’ll pretty much stick to cloud productivity tools, workflows, automation, whatever Atlassian support ticket I happen to have open at the moment, scripting headaches, and the occasional totally off-topic Friday afternoon rabbit hole. On the topic of what’s going to show up here, I had to read the documentation for the blog theme that I selected to understand the difference between Notes and Posts. I think I’ll roughly stick to a pattern of posts being more involved and explanation heavy while notes will be brief updates.
Welcome to the party.