After a lot of soul searching, I've decided to take The Solo Admin blog in a new direction. I'm still passionate about my intended audience - solo IT practitioners, members of small IT departments, employees of MSP's who focus on small business, or even perhaps employees who were drafted to perform IT duties when there was no one else available to perform them. I fall into this category; I'm the sole IT person for a small business of 35 employees and I know there must be many others like me out there. I've had amazing mentors and opportunities throughout my career and I want to give something back to the industry that has provided me with a rewarding career for so many years now. I know there are many folks for whom working in a small company translates to being new to IT and at an early stage in their careers. In those instances, without a mentor and other team members to learn from and help share the load, it can be a struggle just to keep your head above water. In other instances, perhaps you're an experienced manager of a small team of folks. Or maybe you're like me and you're in a unique situation where you're well into your career and chose your position because it requires a huge diversity of knowledge, including both administration and programming, and you were tired of the large corporate "same job every day" grind. Whatever the case, I know you're out there!
If you're one of my small band of subscribers (thank you so very much if you are!) or just someone who's stopped in from time to time to check out a post, then you know that I've mainly done technical "how-to" type posts like my Batch Downloading with Python post. And while I've enjoyed doing those, in general, I don't feel they're the best purpose for the blog. In most of them, I ended up linking to the excellent work that other folks had already done and I felt that I wasn't contributing very much in the overall scheme of things. So I really felt I was at a crossroads. I love doing this blog and I want to continue to grow and find new readers, but what I've done so far has amounted to little more than a whisper in a windstorm. The feeling became overwhelming that I needed to go a different way.
In April of this year, I authored a post titled The Solo Developer. Rather than provide a step-by-step walk through, the post was written as a set of general guidelines a solo developer could follow. To my surprise, it was - and still is - far and away the most read post on the site; nothing else has even come close. Seeing this result was the confirmation I needed that the blog's articles should be more high-level, focusing more on general topics and sharing the knowledge I've gained from over 25 years in the industry.
The posts on the blog - for the most part - will still be very technical because my passion lies in the day-to-day, hands-on (which explains why I'm 25 years into my career and still haven't moved to management), but I'm also going to be writing about high-level skills - building user and management relationships, security processes and training, integrating cutting edge tech on a shoestring budget, etc. You'll still find code snippets, whole scripts, config files, and possibly even a short how-to if the situation calls for it. I'll still share things that I work on that I feel others could make use of; for example, I have a set of configuration management scripts that I've used for years that I've often thought about combining into a "mini Ansible" and maybe I'll turn it into a short series of posts and a Github repo.
The bottom line is if you've read any of my posts and enjoyed them, thank you for taking the time; it means a lot to me. Take a minute to subscribe or add my feed to your RSS reader (I personally recommend Tiny Tiny RSS) and I promise I will do my best to make it worth your time. I also promise that if you provide your email address to the blog, I will never, ever, EVER sell or use your info in any way other than to send you blog-related stuff.
So stay tuned for some new content coming soon!