A Big Thanks to all Volunteers out There!

Over the course of the last two decades and throughout my professional career, I was fortunate enough to leverage a sheer abundance of online resources when it came to cracking tough technical problems. The rise of the internet gave way to punching every imaginable problem under the sun into a search engine of choice in the hope that it would lead to a solution.

But what really made the difference were the pages — or more precisely the content thereon — that consistently showed up in the top sections of the search results. These pages provided me with a plethora of extremely useful, detailed, and specialised solutions to sometimes very peculiar problems of mine.

Whenever climbing technical problems with the help of online resources, I felt reminded of a quote which is most commonly attributed to Isaac Newton who said

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

I can truly say that if it wasn’t for the likes of StackOverflow and numerous online blogs I would not have been able to crack certain hard technical problems. It were these blog articles that showed me how to solve the problem in front of me.

But some of the these pages also went beyond just solving my immediate problem and introduced me to the underlying concepts, the inner mechanics, and hidden secrets. They introduced me to new technologies, told me to stay away from others, and sometimes even crushed my beliefs. While the latter one did sting (I have to admit), it also broadened my perspective and allowed me to grow.

Now, most of these incredibly useful sites are often carefully curated by volunteers from all professions. These people aren’t usually paid to write. They write because they care. About the things they write about. And giving back to the community that has given them so much.

Time to Give Back to the Community!

While I have been an avid reader of numerous blogs and websites over the years, I feel that it’s time to give back to the community that has helped me so much.

The problems I did stumble across in recent times were quite specialised. I can imagine that the lessons I learned while cracking these problems might be useful to someone else trying to crack the same (or a similar) problems. An opportunity to save time and get to the solution quicker. In essence, a shortcut.

Because technology should be simple.

How Hard Can It Be?!

So, here we go! The idea of this blog is to post articles about technical problems and their solutions. And then some longer thoughts. Because sometimes, a good path to a great solution is to rethink what the real problem is in the first place.

Oh, you’re probably wondering about the feature image. Why smash a beautiful MacBook Pro with a hammer? Well, simply because sometimes, things are not that easy. Much rather the opposite. They’re bloody hard. That’s when emotions can suggest to crack the problem with a slightly different approach. A hammer, for example. Well, sometimes, all you need is a bigger hammer…!

Ah, you’re probably also wondering what’s on the Mac’s screen? If you can’t zoom in or I’ve messed up the resolution, let me tell you. It’s an error I received while trying to get the Helm Chart Repository in S3 - With Auto-Generated User Documentation to work. It turned out that the problem didn’t really need a hammer to fix a silly typo. Does anyone know how to glue butterfly keys back together and get them working in a slightly dented keyboard bay by any chance…?!