Background
Hello! So, I should probably start with a little bit about me. My name’s Mike and I currently work at a college as a “eLearning and ILT Coordinator”. Outside of the education sector this title has literally no context, essentially I am in charge of classroom technology (Smart screens, projectors, AV), the administration of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), staff training (around digital) and IT support. I am mostly focused towards Teachers but I will support students on the IT side of things.
I really do enjoy my job, I get to work on and run my own projects but it simply doesn’t support my passion which is IT. In fact, working in this job somewhat reignited my passion for IT, I’ve got to get experience in enterprise grade IT equipment and see the processes around them which has led me to actually try and pivot my career fully in IT.
I’ve had a keen interest in IT since an early teenager in which I built my first Desktop. I’ve dabbled in numerous different IT related projects, creating IRC bots as a teenager. I assumed that I would likely go into an IT job but that didn’t end up happening. I worked a number of Jobs from when I was 18, constructions, factory work and Bill posting in the underground. These jobs had no progression and the job on the underground was absolutely brutal, working 10 nights in a row is not ideal for someone in their early 20s, completely destroyed my social life.
So I decided to take the plunge, handed in my notice, moved back home and applied to IT course at my local college. Due to my age, I had to pay for it myself and had no financial support. As I had my own place I basically had to work full time and go to college 4 days a week. Some days it was getting up at 5am, going to work until midday and then going to college until 5. Long days but I loved my course, I felt so awkward on the first few days being 24 in a class full of 16 year olds but it was a blast.
After a few months of the long days my friend introduced me to Matched Betting, essentially you take advantage of bookies sign up/on going offers by betting on all outcomes just to get the free bet and then doing the same again. I was sceptical at first but in my first full month which was in December I made almost £2500 on matched betting alone. This meant I could heavily cut down my working hours and do matched betting to top up my funds. After I completed my BTEC with a grade of D*D*D* I moved onto my degree. As I got financial support for this it was a lot easier, I graduated with a first in BSc Computing & Systems Development.
Why I started this website/blog?
I am now in my 30s and I have finally found a career path that I like the look of and is quite enjoyable! I really enjoy the administration side of IT and decided either a SysOps or DevOps role would be the end goal for me. I have started studying for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner which also inspired me to create this blog, to document my journey in a way. I started at the bottom as I was (am) very much a newbie when it comes to AWS services, once I have attained this certification I will likely go onto Azure Fundamentals and then pick one of the two to progress through (probably Microsoft though as there seems to be a lot more job opportunities in my area).
I also plan to document some side projects I do, in fact this website is one of them! I have a few servers, I run a proxmox server at home which I’ve built a media server VM on and Seedbox (for seeding Linux distros and such). This is hosted on a VPS which is extremely cheap, I wanted to use docker as I’ve never done so before. This web server is done through docker, all I really had to was create a configuration file and docker compose does the rest, pulls down the container, sorts out my SSL certificates, it’s absolutely incredible!
I will likely add additional pages over time, an About me page and probably a few pages where I can shove useful Linux commands that I come across to reinforce the learning!