Hello World.
I’m Andy Welsh. I’m a Cloud Engineer and Sysadmin from the North East of England.
I enjoy designing and building secure, efficient and scalable systems, automating tedious work, making unstable systems healthy and learning about the low level systems that underpin technologies. I also enjoy explaining how complicated technologies work to people who are new to them or are struggling to understand them.
I have a particular interest in the areas of Cloud-Native Technologies, Infrastructure as Code, Encryption and Security Protocols.
As much as I love all of these technologies I dislike the high barriers to entry that their ecosystems can present. There is more than ever to know out there and it can be pretty intimidating trying to work out where to start. As if they weren’t complicated enough, confusing documentation, opaque marketing hype and community elitism make them unnecessarily difficult for both engineers and developers to adopt. It’s my hope these posts will assist someone further down the line struggling to make sense of some of these technologies, like so many other posts and blogs have for me.
This site is a collection of my own guides, projects and solutions to real world problems that I haven’t found much about anywhere else, presented in what’s hopefully a clear, grounded and accessible manner that assumes very little prior knowledge. It’s not a content mill and I’m not interested in writing the same article that you can find copy and pasted in a million other places online.
I’m not the final authority on any topic I talk about here and I’m always excited to learn something new. If you think you have a better solution to anything you see on this site, if something isn’t as clear as you think it could be or if you’re really really stuck on a problem that you think I might know something about then drop me a line or leave a comment and we can take a look at it together.
Sometimes people email me asking if they can tip me for some information they found here. If you’re one of those people, it’s very nice of you but I’m not interested in some third party company harvesting your data or skimming pennies off a donation for my sake and I’m not really trying to make any money from this site, but I do appreciate the thought. If you really want to do something nice just share the article that helped you and hopefully someone else will find it helpful too 🙂
I don’t run ads on this site and I don’t gather any identifiable visitor data. Privacy matters are important to me and hopefully they’re important to you.
I also like Linux, a lot.