Launching the Rebuilt Site: Fast, Lean, and Simple

2025-08-30

Welcome to the new site. I’ve kept it fast, lightweight, and simple built for sharing concise field notes, guides, and the occasional hobby tangent. The idea is to give you a quick way to learn from real engineering work without wading through fluff.

Instead of long, click‑bait essays, expect short, focused posts you can scan in a couple of minutes: what failed, how I diagnosed it, the fix, and any gotchas worth knowing. When something deserves more depth, I’ll turn it into a reproducible guide.

What You’ll Find Here

• Personal opinions (kept practical)
• Field notes from real‑world experience
• Hardening patterns and baseline configs
• Compliance, business continuity, and disaster recovery lessons
• PowerShell, Ansible, and policy snippets to reduce drift
• Clear documentation and step‑by‑step guides

Hopefully, something here saves you time or headache.

Stack & Hosting

The site is built with Hugo (Markdown → static HTML/CSS) and deployed automatically via DigitalOcean App Platform on every push to main in the GitHub repo. App Platform runs the Hugo build, serves the static output behind its global CDN, and handles TLS + redirects—so no bucket ACL tuning or custom deploy scripts needed now. JavaScript stays intentionally minimal (theme toggle, tag expansion, email obfuscation).

Benefits:

• Zero infrastructure babysitting (build + deploy pipeline managed)
• Automatic, fast redeploys from a plain git push
• Global CDN + HTTPS out of the box
• Simple to version, diff, and roll back content

Lab Gear Snapshot

Picked up a pair of Sophos XGS 3300 appliances for the homelab recently - total overkill for a domestic rack, but great for testing HA, policy tuning, and segmentation without touching production. Mostly here because they look cool:

May write up the HA / failover lab once I’ve finished playing with them.

Publishing Rhythm

No fixed schedule. I’ll post when there’s something useful and repeatable to share, quality over cadence.

Get Updates

There’s an RSS feed (find it at /index.xml or via your browser’s feed discovery). Subscribe if you prefer a feed reader over checking back manually.

Thanks

If there’s something specific you’d like me to cover, drop a note via the contact page. Always happy to hear ideas.

Connor