About Me

My name is Christian and I am the VP of Engineering at Detexian, a tech/infosec start-up. While I have considered starting a blog earlier in my career, I never knew what I would be blogging about. Most of the problems I was solving either seemed trivial or someone else had already provided a thorough walk-through on a blog somewhere.

I feel that now I have reached a point where I can generate some value by writing a blog. The position of a Head of Engineering or VP of Engineering can be quite hands-off. However, in a start-up in tends to oscillate between being a hands-off manager one moment and solving tech problems over a large range of categories. Often, it just comes down to there being nobody in the business who already knows the answers and the engineering team being too busy to get side tracked with it. So, the task falls to the Head of Engineering who essentially turns into a perpetual noob who has to learn (often trivial) new things to keep things moving.

To give an example, only about 3 years ago I knew essentially nothing about cloud computing. I had a strong system administration background (particularly in Linux) but had hardly had exposure to cloud computing. In the time since, I have had to wrap my head around various AWS services (along with some small amount of Google Cloud and Azure) and learn defining all those services in Terraform. A lot of time went into web searches and trial and error. Sometimes, there was a nice comprehensive walk-through, sometimes it was pieced together from many sources.

The idea of this blog is to pick the problems that required research and recombination and build walk-throughs from them to save the next noob (head of engineering or otherwise) the time I had to spend.

Please note that as always the usual disclaimer applies that any views expressed in this blog are exclusively my own. This is a personal blog and not associated with my employer or any other organisation I may be connected to.