About

For now I sit on the edge of burn-out and have started to cut out time thieves and things that simply no longer gives me any joy.
With this comes the management overhead of certain things and such things should be automated where possible to avoid having to tend to it like a pet rather than cattle.
Reducing parts of the infrastructure that you are surrounded by to cattle rather than pets should net you quite a bit of less stress and more freedom to do what you want and/or enjoy.

Furthermore I decided it was time to stop tinkering on my own time and not to fight with tools etc.
This lead me to swap ecosystems totally from a Win/Lin setup where things are hacked together to somewhat work, over to Apple and OSX where I get most of what I need on a day to day basis.
For more special things, I do have the Windows Gaming rig, and a plethora of Linux devices and servers strewn about.
My goal in all of this is to reduce tension, reduce time spent on silly things like getting Docker to play nicely on Windows with WSL2 and such.
I am in my life where I simply just want things to work without having to fight with the tools I depend on.
This will also be where I can tie in my professional life as a SysAdmin, which gives me the free skills of Automating things via Ansible, as this is something I am doing on a day-to-day basis and can ease up quite a bit of frustration.
The trade here is a few weeks with hard work and then a much lessened load after that where all maintenance can be planned and automated properly rather than having to go to each little pet and stroke it with its hairs and talk nicely to it…

At the beginning of the pandemic we are currently sitting in, I lost my job as a Storage and Linux Administrator where the company I worked for did some rather big reductions.
All the while my particular skillset was less desired at that point since I have deep roots in the Data Centre and On Premises infrastructure, when they desired a 100% shift of focus to the Cloud.
With the severance package I got… and while my wife was crying and wondering how we would survive, I went out and purchased myself a smoker, and started to smoke meats ranging from Chicken to Bacon.
I did reassure the wife that I would land on my feet and we would be okay, but there would still be a worry there that I would not fully be able to lift.
The good thing is, it only took me a month and a half to land a new equivalent job which I am happily doing now, where I have a clean separation between private and professional. While the severance package I got would easily allow me to spend up to 6 months looking for a suitable job where I did not take the first thing landing in my lap, but something that I could stick with.